 Good morning. This is Dean Neely. I'm the deputy chief pilot at the Armstrong Flight Research Center out in Southern California with NASA. This morning I'm led to talk to you a little bit about airborne science and particularly the ER2, the high altitude aircraft that we use, that's still the highest aircraft in the world. So we use that and several other aircraft take science instruments up through the Earth's atmosphere in different environments and be able to study the composition, the effects, the movement of the air in our atmosphere, cloud formations, aerosols, pollution, things like that, all the way down to looking at the topography of the Earth's surface and small changes in that surface based on either flooding, erosion, glacier movements, volcanoes, earthquake, fault lines, things like that. So we study everything inside the Earth's atmosphere from the very top at the edge, all the way down to the Earth's surface. And we use a variety of aircraft with different instruments strapped on them to do that. So today I'll talk to you for a few minutes about some of that. Here with the airborne science mission that we have, which is a little bit different than flight test and aircraft development, we use everything from the ER2, which operates at the top of the Earth's atmosphere. And we also fly Gulfstream G3s, a small business jet with synthetic aperture radar underneath that looks down at the Earth's surface and can look through clouds and everything. And then we also use a DC8, it's a large aircraft, a flying laboratory that we can fly at all altitudes, mostly with instruments that are sampling air high and low altitude. And then we also have another aircraft, which is a 747 special performance that has a big German telescope that sticks out the back. That one actually looks up and out of the Earth's atmosphere, out in other galaxies where we discover new bodies and things like that and star formations and see how they behave. And these are many, many light years away. So that's an exciting aircraft as well. Today, I'll focus on the ER2, our high altitude aircraft. It's a single-seater airplane based on the Air Force U2 built by Lockheed. So it's a small airplane, small cockpit, very long wings on it so that it can still produce lift way up high in the Earth's atmosphere. And it's got a very strong engine in it. No afterburner, but enough power on the ground where it's almost a one-to-one thrust-to-weight ratio. I mean, there's almost as much thrust as there is weight of the aircraft. So when we take off at sea level, it goes straight up. It's an amazing experience when you first take off. One of the challenges that we have since we fly so high, it flies above 70,000 feet. So we're about 13 miles above the Earth's atmosphere when we fly this aircraft. And because of that, there's not much air pressure up there. So to keep all the liquid in our body together, almost as if you're in outer space on the moon or something like that, we've got to wear a space suit. So this full pressure suit keeps everything together. And but it causes a few challenges in the cockpit as well. Normally, on a regular aircraft, we would fly with a headset and microphone like you'd see on an airliner or a general aviation aircraft. Some aircraft, we may have to wear a helmet and a mask like this one for with oxygen supplied to us for high performance, mostly. For flying the ER-2 in the lower atmosphere, we'll fly with this helmet in a normal flight suit like I'm wearing now. And that will give us protection in case we had to use the ejection seat if we were having a bad day out there. Normally, we're doing a science mission where we want to take the airplane and the set of science instruments way up high to look down through clouds and aerosol formations and the flow through the air and how those behave together. Then we're going to wear this full space suit here. In that case, we have a little more robust helmet like this one that goes along with the space suit. It's got oxygen leads that go through the back of the aircraft or the back of the helmet and plug into the aircraft. Some of the problems that we have with that is in the space suit, you can't hear anything, feel anything. You can't smell. It takes all of your senses away, so there's a real kind of a claustrophobic feeling you can get and that gets a little bit exciting at times and some people really wouldn't like it. So the few of us that fly this aircraft for NASA, we have to really enjoy being in that environment and it is very exciting and I've been doing it for years and really love it. When we put the space suit on, our gloves are very cumbersome. This one here is one of mine and you can see that wearing this, it's very difficult to feel anything. You don't have a real sense of touch for details, pushing small buttons, using the flight controls, things like that. Trying to write with a pencil or something like that is very challenging. Another issue that we've got that we have to get past is how do you eat food or drink water during a long mission? Because we can be up there for eight to ten hours, sitting still, strapped into an ejection seat with a parachute and not much room to move around. I'm a small person and with the space suit on my shoulders touch the sides of the canopy and so it's very cramped in there. So with all those hours wearing this suit, you're not going to be able to move your arms and legs very much and that can be a problem. To eat and drink, typically we'll use a water bottle like this that sits back behind the ejection seat with a modified straw that can go through the small bladder in the space helmet. I'll show you that real quick. That's this little port right here that allows us to put the straw in there and then that way we're able to get the straw into our mouth and take sips of water without compromising the suit. The other thing that we do, if you want something to eat, we have tube food that comes in this small tube. It looks like a tube of toothpaste and then we put an adapter, this hard straw on it and do the same thing. It goes through the same bladder and through that port, we're able to squeeze liquefied food. It's almost like baby food, really, into our mouth and that's how we eat during a long flight. So a few challenges that come with that. The exciting part is taking all these challenges together and being able to still fly, operate the aircraft in a challenging environment, way up high, where the air is very thin, makes it very rewarding as well. And that's why most of the NASA research pilots that fly this aircraft and the others really enjoy the challenge and the variety of what we do when we go to work each day. And that's something I wouldn't trade for anything and I feel very fortunate that I was able to participate with this kind of an operation and the great people that we work with every day in Airborne Science. So thanks for the time today and I hope this gave you a little bit of information and insight into what we do at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in supporting Airborne Science.