NASA science team surveys California fires

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      NASA photograph by Tim Williams

This image offers landmark references to a photo captured from NASA’s ER-2 high altitude science platform when it flew over the Thomas Fire in Ventura County on Dec. 7, 2017.

   A team of NASA scientists is using a high-altitude aircraft     sions of science instruments that may one day be launched into   through smoke and dust to see information about the ground
and a sophisticated imaging spectrometer to study environ-         space on board a satellite to observe our home planet Earth.     surface below. This includes observations of trees and other
mental impacts caused by the devastating Southern California                                                                        foliage that ends up being fuel for wildfires.
wildfires.                                                            During these engineering test flights, the aircraft carried
                                                                   several science instruments on board. One of them — a spec-         During a fire, the instrument can see aerosols, or particle
   NASA’s ER-2, based at Armstrong Flight Research Center          trometer called AVIRIS, managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion         matter, produced from the smoke, as well as the combustion
in Palmdale, Calif., flies as high as 70,000 feet, almost twice    Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. — was in the right place at the   process as fuel burns, and accurately measure fire tempera-
as high as a commercial airliner.                                  right time when fires broke out in Los Angeles and Ventura       tures.
                                                                   Counties Dec. 4.
   NASA uses the unique perspective of the ER-2 for science                                                                            AVIRIS can also observe fine details of vegetation, such as
research missions over much of the world. This month, the air-        AVIRIS (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer),      the water content in leaves and what types of species of plants
craft has been flying locally over California, testing early ver-  is a modern instrument with an extensive heritage that can peer
                                                                                                                                                                                      See FIRE, Page 3

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