nasa research flights to antartica and the artic

[Guest scott fletcher]

indepth coverage of the nasa research flights to the artic and antartica.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/icebridge/news/spr11/index.html

 

 

[Guest scott fletcher]

info on some of the aircraft nasa operates research flight with.

 

NASA operates a highly modified McDonnell Douglas DC-8 jetliner as a flying science laboratory. The platform aircraft, based at NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility, Palmdale, Calif., collects data for experiments in support of scientific projects serving the world's scientific community. Included in this community are NASA, federal, state, academic and foreign investigators.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-050-DFRC.html

 

The P-3B is a specialized aircraft operated as an

 

airborne “platform” in support of NASA’s Science

 

Mission Directorate.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/219397main_P-3B_fact_sheet.pdf

 

From the outside NASA’s

 

Beechcraft King Air B200

 

aircraft looks like a small

 

plane that can carry about

 

a dozen passengers.

 

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/219396main_KingAir_fact_sheet.pdf

 

 

[willedoo]

Found a link to an inventory page of some of NASA's aircraft. I'd be curious to know what they do with the F15 & the FA18's.

 

http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/ad/na.html

 

[ATTACH]17981[/ATTACH]

 

 

 

[Guest scott fletcher]

the F-15 and 18s are used by NASA'S Dryden Flight Research Center.

 

to conduct research into sonic booms,collision avoidance technologies,

 

aerodynamic, instrumentation, propulsion,flight control technology,

 

 

[Guest scott fletcher]

NASA allso own and operates B747SP as a Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy platform .

 

A gulfstream 3 and many more . can type up info if any one wants it . let me now ?

 

NASA until the last few yrs allso operated a SR-71 blackbird

 

 

 

[willedoo]

Sounds like they've got a foot in everything, research wise. Having access to their data must have really streamlined the development process of new aircraft. Have read up a bit on the engineering of the F4 Phantom in pre NASA days & McDonnell & the Navy sort of had to just stumble around a bit until everything eventually fell into place. They probably would have given their left arm to have something like NASA involved in research back then.

 

 

[willedoo]

the F-15 and 18s are used by NASA'S Dryden Flight Research Center.to conduct research into sonic booms,collision avoidance technologies,

aerodynamic, instrumentation, propulsion,flight control technology,

Looking at their photo of their F15, I noticed it has canards, so decided to look up a bit of info on it. It's got quite a bit of history going back a long way. Based on the 2 seat trainer variant F15B, the main mods seem to be the fitting of canards & thrust vectoring nozzles, the canards deriving from F18 tail fins which explains the large size of them. It can land in 500 metres & perform aerobatic maneuvers like Porgachev's Cobra. It seems to have been a test bed for a lot of programmes, I imagine a lot of the thrust vectoring research data would have gone into the Raptor & JSF development.

 

Here's an index of NASA's photos of it:

 

http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/F-15ACTIVE/index.html

 

Photo of the Dryden fleet as of 1997:

 

[ATTACH]17982[/ATTACH]