 ASO is a partnership between NASA JPL and the California Department of Water Resources. ASO operates in two states right now in Western US. We operate in California and in Colorado and we're here to measure the snowpack to provide information to help us manage our water resources. ASO tells us two really great things about the snowpack. The first one is how much snow water equivalent is up in the mountains and the second is how reflective or how shiny that snow is and so those two things tell us one how much water we have for our drinking water, for irrigation, how reflective it is tells us when it's gonna melt from the mountains. We have two instruments on board that look through the bottom of the plane at the snowpack. The first instrument is a giant laser pointer. It's a scanning lighter. The second instrument is an imaging spectrometer which is a fancy camera. With the airborne platform we can touch every piece of snow with our lighter. Right now we are delivering information directly to the California Department of Water Resources and that helps them decide where to put water, when to make releases from dams and how to allocate those resources more efficiently. It's amazing to be flying on this plane in the mountains. At 20,000 feet you get an epic view of the watersheds. You get a really great view of the snowpack and how it's distributed and as a scientist I really love sitting up there and thinking about how I can understand the snowpack more. I start off in the spring working very long days making sure that everything is going smoothly but it's really worth it at the end to be able to give that data to the folks that need it so that we can improve our lives and manage our water resources more efficiently.