Campaign Gallery

The AirHARP "doghouse" enclosure inside the ER-2 left wing pod (above left) with switches used to mimic on-board operation by the pilot. The ER-2 aircraft taxis to the hangar after a successful flight on October 23, 2017 (above right).

The front lens is the only part of AirHARP exposed to the elements (above left); the instrument housing fits into a front plate previously flown by its proof-of-concept, the Passive Aerosol and Cloud Suite (PACS), on the ER-2 in 2013 during NASA's Polarimeter Definition Experiment (PODEX). All the participants from ACEPOL campaign, including pilots, and NASA Armstrong ground crew, and instrument teams (AirMSPI, AirHARP, RSP, SPEX, CPL, and HSRL-2) in front of the NASA ER-2 (above right, credit to Andrew Kupchock).

This text string is the only status communication we receive from our instrument during flight (above left). This report relays the date and current time, along with temperature (in Celsius) and current consumption (in A) data from sensors placed inside the doghouse enclosure and on the front plate in thermal contact with the airplane structure. In this example, our front plate registers at -23C at ER-2 flight altitude. We also pull low-resolution thumbnails from the flight computer after acquisitions to check our operation (above right).

Photos taken by NASA Science Pilot D. Stuart Broce, during the flight on Oct-26 (above). You can see the front pod of the left wing where AirHARP is mounted, and the pilot's view of the Santa Monica bay.

The HARP group at UMBC (above left), from the left, is Brent McBride (Ph.D student/instrument scientist), Hamilton Townsend (mechanical engineer), Dr. J. Vanderlei Martins (HARP Principal Investigator), Dr. Roberto Fernandez-Borda (software and optical engineer), and J. Dominik Cieslak (electrical engineer). The HARP CubeSat instrument model is flanked by its predecessors (above right), a proof-of-concept polarimetric camera (left) and the Rainbow Polarimetric Imager (RPI, right), which flew during the 2011 DC3 campaign on-board the NASA DC-8. Images credit to Marlyana Demond (UMBC).