The L-band radar aboard the JSC G-III aircraft successfully completed four local California flights in support of Sacramento Levee monitoring and San Andreas Fault monitoring flight requests.  The radar and the aircraft’s Precision Platform Autopilot (PPA) system both performed very well and the radar was off-loaded at Armstrong’s Palmdale facility before the JSC G-III returned to Texas for annual maintenance and astronaut return mission.

Back at JPL, we’ve had a chance to process the sea ice data acquired on October 6 for lead investigator Ben Holt, who is surveying Beaufort sea ice with his colleagues onboard the National Science Foundation Research Vessel Sikuliaq operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.  We were able to locate the ice breaker in the UAVSAR image and sent the geolocated data to the researchers onboard the ship via satellite communication link.  They will be using UAVSAR data together with satellite SAR imagery to navigate the fresh ice in Beaufort Sea to study the utility of SAR remote sensing to identify young ice types.Attached is a quick look polarimetric color overlay image of the ice field surrounding the ice breaker, which was parked in a narrow crack of multi-year ice.  Visible in the SAR image is the frozen over ship track as the ship traveled north up the narrow crack.