Radiance Calmer holds the wide wings of a drone in place on its launcher, scanning the blue Boulder sky for potential obstacles. Behind her, Jonathan Hamilton stands with a controller in hand. Calmer counts down, “Three...two...one...zero!” and releases. The drone flies off the launcher, hovers just a few feet above the ground for a precarious moment, and then zooms into the clouds at 35 mph.
That February 2020 practice run was just one of two years’ worth of flight tests preparing for an Arctic mission that is pushing the limits in atmospheric research.
Calmer, a postdoctoral researcher with CIRES, and Hamilton, an aerospace engineering graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder, leave in May for the MOSAiC expedition where they will pilot drones to collect atmospheric data over the frozen Arctic Ocean. The National Science Foundation-funded project, spanning several months, involves 20 drones outfitted for atmospheric science and marks the first time drones have been used to gather near-surface atmospheric readings so far north.
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Image via Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences