NASA's newest Earth Venture Suborbital missions are mobilizing hundreds of scientists and pilots across six projects to study atmospheric and environmental phenomena using aircraft-mounted sensors. These missions bridge the gap between ground instruments and satellites, collecting data to improve weather forecasting, city planning, and hazard response. The first project launching this summer is INSPYRE, led by the Naval Research Laboratory, which will chase pyrocumulonimbus clouds -- towering fire storms generated by extreme wildfires. NASA's ER-2 aircraft will carry infrared wildfire trackers developed at JPL to measure and map these dangerous storms in real-time.
The FarmFlux mission will deploy sensors across the Midwest and California's Central Valley to measure agricultural emissions including ozone, methane, and ammonia, which affect human health and climate. Led by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with Colorado State University and Boston University, the mission addresses an understudied component of Earth's atmospheric systems. Meanwhile, the HAMAQ mission will investigate air quality in Atlanta and Mexico City using two aircraft at different altitudes -- NASA's P-3B flying near the surface and the newly acquired 777 science jet mapping pollution from above.
Two Arctic-focused campaigns address rapid environmental change in the far north. Snow4Flow, led by the University of Arizona, will measure glacier retreat across Alaska, the Yukon, Arctic Canada, Greenland, and Svalbard using a modernized WWII-era aircraft equipped with a laser altimeter and custom radars. FORTE, led by NASA Goddard and the City College of New York, will track how rivers and coastal ecosystems on Alaska's North Slope interact with the Arctic Ocean using satellites, aircraft, vessels, and autonomous systems while collaborating with local and tribal communities.
The LACCE project will combine airborne radar with ground sensors to track how California hillslopes respond to intensifying droughts and heavy precipitation, informed by the 2017 Mud Creek landslide that buried a coastal highway. The project also monitors accelerating slope movements in Alaska caused by rapidly retreating glaciers that could trigger mega-tsunamis. NASA's Earth Venture Suborbital program, established in 2007 following a National Research Council recommendation, has supported studies of blizzards, coral reefs, and ocean phenomena over the past two decades.