Operation Ice Bridge

Operation Ice Bridge - How We Got Started
by Sci5

Students recently concluded the data collection phase of their cryosphere research. They are now in the process of analyzing data and reflecting on their work. This is the first of several posts that will describe the project.


Over the past few months, we have been doing our own labs based on NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge Missions. We learned about Operation Ice Bridge through some web chats we had been doing with other NASA Airborne Research projects. Because of this we “joined” the OIB crew while they were flying over Antarctica in a DC8. Using a web tool, we could follow the flight and chat with scientists and educators during the missions.

When we were chatting with the OIB crew, we asked them about their mission. We asked them about the kinds of data they were collecting and the tools they were using. They explained that they were exploring changes in the polar ice caps. To do this, measuring the how much ice there was using a laser on the belly of the airplane. These measurements could detect very small changes in the ice. They are measuring the ice to see what the effects of global warming might be.

Click here for more information about NASA Operation Ice Bridge.

After our chat with the OIB crew, we had a class meeting brainstorming different questions and investigations about ice.

Some of our questions were:

• Why does cold air sink?
• How does ice move or change?
• Does global warming affect the ice in Antarctica?
• If not global warming, what is affecting the ice?
• At what temperatures of water and air does ice melt?
• How does ice react to different temperatures of air?
• How does ice react to different temperatures of water?
• How does ice react to different amounts of ice and water?
• Does ice react differently to relatively dry warm air vs humid warm air?
• Does the kind of ice matter? eg. small cubes, large blocks, chips, slush, etc.
• How does ice react to wind?
• How does salinity of water affect ice?

For some of the questions we asked the OIB crew about them in later chats. For others, we actually designed some experiments to try and figure things out.

We will describe each experiment in later posts...

Airplane Math 2

by Math 4
Our flight planning continues...

We were planning a mission to go from Wallops Space Flight Center to Boston, to NYC, to Philadelphia, to Baltimore, to Washington, DC and back to Wallops.

We are testing air quality and circling each of these cities once. 

We will be flying NASA's P-3B Orion. 

NASA P-3B Orion in flight
Discover-AQ

To find out if our mission was possible we had to do some math. YAY!!! (standing O for math)

When flying between cities we are flying 450 mph. When circling to collect data we are flying 250 mph. Each circle for collecting data is 125 miles. There are five circles. 

First we added up all the spaces between each city.

417 mi + 191 mi + 81 mi + 89 mi + 36 mi + 121 mi = 935 miles

We need to figure out how much fuel this will take.

To do this, we need to know how much time it will take to fly 935 miles. We need to divide 935 by 450. That equals 2 hrs with a remainder of 35 miles. We then had to figure out how long it will take to fly 35 miles. It will take an extra 5 minutes to fly the remaining 35 miles. Total cruise time is 2 hrs 5 min.

Now we need to know how much fuel for data collection. Each circle is 125 miles and there are five of them. 125 x 5 = 625 miles. It will take 2 hrs 30 minutes. (625 / 250 = 2 and 1/2)

[insert work here]

Total mission time: 

2 hr 5 min (cruise) + 2 hr 30 min (data) + 3 hrs (safety margin) = 7 hrs 35 min

This would take 32,502 lbs of fuel.

YAY!!! We can fly the mission with almost 30,000 lbs of fuel to spare!

Emily and Sally asked us if we were going to do more than one spiral at each city. Now we need to see if we can do that.  

Airplane Math

by Math 4
4th Grade Math is practicing their multiplication and division skills. We decided to make some problems that NASA Mission Planners might need to work out.

NASA Airborne Research has a variety of airplanes that they use for Earth Science research. These planes are like flying laboratories and observation posts. The chart below gives some information about some of the aircraft used in missions we’ve been following this year. We are using this data to create interesting multiplication and division problems.

*	*	*
Global Hawk UAV	DC-8	P-3 Orion
12,000 lbs of fuel	160,000 lbs of fuel	60,000 lbs of fuel
30 hours flight duration	12 hours flight duration	14 hours flight duration
Take-off Weight: 25,600 lbs	Take-off Weight: 340,000 lbs	Take-off Weight: 135,000 lbs
1900 lb payload	30,000 lb payload	14,700 lb payload
397 mph	518 mph	460 mph
12,658 mile flight range	6214 mile flight range	4373 mile flight range
65,000 ft max altitude	41,000 ft max altitude	32,000 ft max altitude
Humans: 0 (UAV)	Humans: 50	Humans: 24
Missions: HS3, ATTREX	Missions: OIB	Missions: Discover-AQ
Flights: 9	Flights: 23	Flights: 10
*	*	*

Our first problem: How much fuel does each plane use in one hour of flight?

Operation Ice Bridge

by Sci 5
Inspired by NASA Operation Ice Bridge, 5th Grade Science students have been designing original research, collecting and analyzing data. They will continue to share their research through this blog throughout the winter.

Our Operation Ice Bridge work continues...

Our testing rig: Vernier LabQuest with temperature and light intensity probes.

We are trying to learn about global warming and how it affects the polar ice caps. We are testing the albedo of different ground covers, including sand, snow, woodchips, grass, pavement, water, soil and ice. Albedo is the light that is reflected off of a surface. We are measuring albedo because we noticed that the air temperatures were different over different ground cover. We are trying to find out if the reason there are different temperatures is because there are different amounts of light reflected from surfaces. If there is a lot of reflected light, it might cause it to get warmer. If the snow and ice have such a high albedo, maybe that warms the air and adds to the melting of the polar ice. Because of global warming, the greenhouse gasses make it harder for the reflected heat to escape. The warm air gets trapped and melts the polar ice. We know from other work that cold air sinks. Could high albedo cause less melting? We are also wondering how the industrial countries in the Northern Hemisphere are affecting things. Are there more sources of greenhouse gasses in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere? Is there a difference in how the Arctic is being affected compared to the Antarctic?

Does albedo change the air temperature?
Does albedo change the melting rates of snow and ice?
Does albedo change as snow/ice melts?
Do different surface and air temperatures affect the albedo of snow/ice?

Maybe sand has such a high albedo because it is made of tiny crystals like snow and ice are... maybe snow (sparkly crushed up ice) works the same way... maybe it gets hot like sand does with the sun’s light...

Where do you like to do math?

by Math4

Where do you most enjoy working on mathematics? What kind of a space helps you think? When you're stuck on a problem, where do you go? What do you do to get un-stuck?

We asked this question of Marcus du Sautoy via twitter and here is his response:

Read the comments below to see our thoughts, AND please share your thoughts with us.

Operation Ice Bridge

by Sci5

We have been working on Operation Ice Bridge aka OIB. After following the NASA Airborne Sciences OIB missions over Antarctica,  we decided we would follow in NASA’S footsteps and do our own ice bridge study. We started by going outside and taking the icy and slushy snow temperatures we also took the temperatures of the soil, wood chips, grass and pond water. We also did an inside sort of control trial with regular freezer ice. 

We are are looking at what the conditions are like over ice. What happens when it's sunny or windy? What changes how ice melts?

We took temperatures of the air near the surface of the ground and at 1, 2, and 3 foot heights. We use a PVC pipe with holes through it to hold our temperature probes. We are also measuring the soil temperature. We've been looking at the data and trying to find patterns. One thing we noticed is that it's different over different kinds of ground cover. We are wondering if that has anything to do with how much light is reflected from the surface. We are planning to measure the reflected light and see if there are temperature differences with that.

Using LabQuest and Vernier Temperature Probes

While doing IceBridge work we learned many things. We have talked about how global warming has maybe done some things with the polar ice caps. We are trying to find ways to test this out. We learned a lot of side things also, like snow is so reflective from the sun because it has a lot of something called albedo. We learned that global warming is caused because our atmosphere is thickening. When the light and heat from the sun hit the ground/snow/Antarctica it bounces right back up and since the atmosphere has thickened, it gets trapped and stays. The role the humans have in this is WE are making the atmosphere thicker.

Our First Data

We have come up with some good hypotheses. We have done some good control tests and outside tests. Next we should go on to testing our hypotheses in the classroom. We should also do more outside trials and look more deeply for patterns. 

Follow our mission and share your comments.

It's A Heartbeat Away

by Math4
(Teacher's note: this group is practicing the multiplication algorithm, multiplying multi-digit factors and working with multi-step applications of the algorithm.)

We came into the room on Monday morning and our teacher had this up on the board:

We then all started asking questions and sharing ideas about what might make our hearts beat faster or slower.

• how many times does it beat in a minute?
• how do we know how fast it beats?
• it matters if you're exercising or still
• depends on what you're doing
• might matter what you're eating
• running beats fast
• depends how long you live
• health condition might affect
• months have different numbers of days
• leap years...
• does gravity matter?
• does mass/weight matter?
• does our heart slow down while sleeping?
• does fatigue or dehydration affect?
• does age matter?
• rate is always changing... need an estimate
• does height matter?
• get resting, then exercising, get an average... rate between the two
• everyone will have a different answer
• does respiration rate matter?

We wanted to figure out how many times our heart would beat in a minute while we were sitting down. We thought this might be a lower number of beats because when you’re exercising your heart beats faster. We called this our resting pulse. We used this to calculate how many times our heart would beat in an hour and then in a day. Then we tried jogging around to get our exercise rate.
This got us interested in how gravity might affect pulse rates and what the differences might be for someone on the International Space Station. We tweeted some questions to space to get some more information. 

We learned that Suni Williams has the record for female EVA time (50hrs 40min). We wondered how many times her heart beat during those EVAs. Our school nurse came and talked to us about how our hearts work, how it beats, why it beats and some of the different things that make it beat faster or slower. We learned that when you are excited, your heart beats faster. Since Suni was out it space, she was probably pretty excited and maybe nervous or even a bit scared, so her pulse rate might be like our exercise pulses. 

When we measured our own pulses, we found that everyone had different rates. We decided to “average” our data and use the pulse that was in the middle of the class data. Our teacher told us that is called the median. Our median resting pulse rate was 76 beats per minute and our median exercise rate was 106 beats per minute. We used the median exercise rate to find out that Suni’s heart beat about 322,240 times during all of her EVA time!

We also got curious about pulses of other animals. We asked ISS National Lab what the Medaka fish pulse was. We decided to give the Medaka fish 85 days mission, the same length as CMDR Hadfield’s mission. The Medaka have a pulse of 116 beats per minute. That means their heart would beat 14,198,400 times during that mission!

Read more about the Medaka fish on ISS.

We also figured out that our hearts would beat about 39,945,600 times in 2013!

This was a lot of fun. It was a great learning experience. It was cool to learn about how many times our heart beats. It was fun learning about what could affect your heart. 

Try these experiments out in your classroom and see what you find. Write us in the comments section and let us know what  you learn.