[Music]
[Volcano Rumbling]
[Airplane landing]
>>My day starts when the plane lands.
Once the plane is brought back into the hangar
and the data is removed from the plane, that's
when I start looking at it to see if there's
any problems that we can address prior to
the next flight so that we don't waste flight
hours and fuel.
[Background noise]
I've got some thermal infrared imagery here,
and you can see the hot spot at the lava lake,
you can see the lava tubes a little bit, through
there.
Prior to launching a satellite, or even after
launching it, the airborne instrument is used
to calibrate that satellite or to develop
new algorithms for the satellite that is being
proposed.
The MASTER instrument is a MODIS-Airborne
ASTER Simulator.
We have four major areas of the electromagnetic
spectrum that we look at, from visible to
thermal.
As the plane is flying straight ahead, the
instrument is scanning the ground underneath,
in a full 360 degree rotation.
At 20 kilometers of altitude, we can capture
about 37 kilometers of the ground in this
airplane.
Everything in this world has a spectral signature,
and so by combining different wavelengths
of light, you can ascertain the presence of
a certain compound, element, or aerosol, based
on their spectral signature.
There are different particles in the atmosphere,
water vapor, ozone, pollutants, sulfuric acid
from the volcanoes, a lot of things in the
air column.
By getting above the entire air column, you
can then predict what the satellite's going
to see and make certain assumptions based
on that.
[Music]
Here we have the MASTER Instrument, the MODIS
Airborne ASTER Simulator.
We have a spinning mirror down here, that's
allowing light to be collected and folded
up into the system where it passes through
beam-splitting dichroics, folding mirrors,
and it gets passed into different detector
arrays within the spectrometer that collects
the visible through the thermal infrared.
We have to keep the detectors very cold because
the short-wave, mid-wave, and long-wave infrared
detectors are sensitive to heat.
[Background noise]
I really enjoy working for NASA because of
all the interesting people that I get to meet and
places I get to go.
We're on cutting edge technology.
There are so many things on the Earth that
we still don't understand.
We need the data to input into our models
to understand things like weather or extreme
events, climate change for instance, and just
basically document our changing world.
[Airplane taking off]
[Music]
