ESI Flies High in NASA's PACE-PAX Field Campaign

From August to October 2024, the Earth and Space Institute (ESI) leads the AirHARP2 participation during the NASA PACE Post-launch Airborne eXperiment (PACE-PAX) field campaign at Edwards AFB, CA. The objective of PACE-PAX is to validate the measurements and science products of NASA's Plankton Aerosol Cloud ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, an advanced ocean and atmosphere observation satellite in low Earth orbit. AirHARP2 includes a copy of the HARP2 multi-angle polarimeter instrument on the PACE satellite, and several other remote sensors that measure from the ultraviolet to the shortwave infrared. The ESI contributed HARP2 to the PACE mission, which marks the first university payload on a flagship NASA Earth sciences mission in space. 

ESI chief engineer Dominik Cieslak (left) and mechanical engineer Ian Decker (right) integrated the AirHARP2 instrument (center) into the pod of the NASA ER-2 high altitude aircraft in early August. ESI scientist Dr. Brent McBride, UMBC Atmospheric Physics graduate students Rachel Smith and Noah Sienkiewicz, and ESI thermal engineer Danny Nelson currently lead the science campaign in the field, with remote data analysis and operations support from ESI faculty and students at UMBC. Seven months of global data from the NASA PACE mission is publicly available on NASA's EarthData service. The PACE-PAX public data release is slated for no earlier than March 31, 2025.