Mara Nutt, a geology student at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., connects empty canisters used to collect whole air samples onboard the NASA DC-8 at the Armstrong Flight Research Center. Students in SARP are divided into four groups that are each headed by a different university professor from universities around the country.
NSRC Instrumentation Engineer Dr. Steven Schill shows students the aircraft installation for a chilled mirror hygrometer, an instrument used to measure the water content of the atmosphere, at the Armstrong Flight Research Center. Schill is part of a team of engineers and scientists that run many different instruments onboard the DC-8 for the SARP flights.
Kasey Castello, an electrical engineering and computer systems engineering student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and Dennis Finger, a molecular environmental Biology student at the University of California, Berkeley, feel NASA Armstrong Pilot Stu Broce’s flight suit as it inflates for a pressure check. Broce was preparing for a flight in the high-altitude ER-2 Earth resources aircraft.