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ATom: Flight Dynamics for the NASA DC-8 Aircraft

Submitted by ORNL DAAC Staff on 2021-12-19
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Photo of NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory.
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Photo of NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory.

The ORNL DAAC recently released the following Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) dataset by Yang, M.M., et al. (2021):

ATom: Flight Dynamics and Environmental Parameters of the NASA DC-8 Aircraft

This dataset contains flight dynamics and environmental parameters (often referred to as housekeeping) specific to the DC-8 aircraft as collected from an assortment of instruments across all four ATom campaigns flown from 2016 through 2018. Measurements include aircraft position, altitude, speed, wind parameters, air temperature, and atmospheric and cabin pressure. These data can be used to understand the interior and exterior conditions and positioning of the DC-8 aircraft at 1-second resolution.

The Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) is a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital-2 mission to study the impact of human-produced air pollution on greenhouse gases and on chemically reactive gases in the atmosphere. ATom deployed an extensive gas and aerosol payload on the NASA DC-8 aircraft for systematic, global-scale sampling of the atmosphere, profiling continuously from 0.2 to 12 km altitude. Around-the-world flights were conducted in each of four seasons between 2016 and 2018.

Additional data from ATom and other relevant links can be found on the ORNL DAAC's ATom Project Page.

Citation: Yang, M.M., and J.R. Bennett. 2021. ATom: Flight Dynamics and Environmental Parameters of the NASA DC-8 Aircraft. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1909

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