Location<\/strong>: Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
Jointly organized by the NASA History Office and the Earth Science Division, this workshop seeks to document the important contributions of airborne campaigns implemented on NASA\u2019s DC-8 Airborne Science Laboratory. The workshop will be a combination of keynote talks, panel discussions, and roundtables. The intention is to publish an anthology of selected papers of key presentations.<\/p>\n
NASA\u2019s DC-8 aircraft recently completed nearly four decades of service to NASA with its retirement in early 2024 following the completion of the ASIA-AQ campaign.\u00a0 The DC-8, which NASA acquired in 1985, was a workhorse aircraft for NASA\u2019s Airborne Science Program of NASA\u2019s Earth Science Division (ESD), serving as the primary platform\u2014or one of several platforms\u2014of many airborne campaigns. Its contributions are legendary from flying as part of the first polar stratospheric ozone campaigns in the late 1980s, through campaigns focused on ice sheets, sea ice, terrestrial ecology, greenhouse gases, and air quality that continued throughout its lifetime.<\/p>\n
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<\/figure>Besides the process knowledge that the DC-8 provided, it served as an important proving ground for new instrumentation and techniques that helped pave the way for their eventual use in ESD\u2019s space flight program, a source of calibration\/validation data for ESD\u2019s satellite instruments, and as a flying laboratory for students, post-docs and early career professionals to design, build, and test instruments, acquire data, and analyze it. It also was the primary platform for NASA\u2019s now 15-year-old Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), which has provided hands-on opportunities for well over 400 young scientists and has an outstanding \u201cSTEM retention rate\u201d for its past participants.<\/p>\n
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<\/figure>In this workshop, the ESD and related investigator communities are invited to share examples of the scientific, programmatic, and human achievement of the DC-8 over its nearly four decades of service to NASA. Besides descriptions of the science accomplished, workshop planners invite discussion of \u201clessons learned\u201d about operation of a large airborne research laboratory that can be used as NASA moves ahead with furnishing and outfitting the DC-8\u2019s successor, a B-777 that NASA acquired in 2023 in response to a strong recommendation from a 2021 report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine that ESD needed to have such a platform following the retirement of the DC-8 (Airborne Platforms to Advance NASA Earth System Science Priorities: Assessing the Future Need for a Large Aircraft ).<\/a><\/p>\n Workshop planners are seeking proposals for papers from ESD, related investigator communities\u2014including academia, interagency and international partners, and private sector\/non-profit entities\u2014that detail scientific and programmatic results, lessons learned, and personal examples of how the DC-8 advanced science, informed decisions, and provided training opportunities for several generations of NASA.<\/p>\n If you wish to present a paper or have questions, please send an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short biography or curriculum vitae, including affiliation by March 31, 2024 to\u00a0Dr. Brian C. Odom<\/a>.<\/p>\n