Mission Summary Date: April 4, 2001 ER-2 Flight Number: 01-057 Deployment: TEXAS 2001 Flight Location: Gulf of Mexico (TERRA) Principal Investigator: Dr. Chris Moeller (Univ. of Wisc) Additional Sensors: Scanning-HIS, VIS Objective: Underfly Terra (1706 UTC) in clear sky over deepwater Gulf of Mexico for MODIS emissive band IR comparisons at MODIS scan angle of about 23 deg. Level-1B Processing Information Level-1B Data processed by: Ames Research Center Level-1B Data Version: #02 Level-1B Configuration: (sample file) Calibration Type: final Calibration Version: 0.1 Status: Completed with final calibration.

Flight Track Map

Flight Summary
Take-off was at 1500 UTC. ER-2 landed at 1945 UTC. ER-2 flew from Kelly AFB eastward over the Gulf of Mexico in clear and cloudy skies, to near the Mississippi River Birdfoot delta and entered a racetrack (at the NW point) oriented parallel to the Terra orbital track and offset so that the scan angle to the racetrack is about 23 deg. off-nadir. Flew southbound leg then met Terra at 1706 UTC on the 1st run of the northbound leg. Skies were partly cloudy (30% coverage) on these legs with scattered popcorn cumulus; the clearest air was in the northern half of the southbound line of the racetrack. A 2nd orbit was collected under similar sky conditions.


Data Evalutation
Isolated clear scenes of Deepwater Gulf of Mexico with MODIS overhead viewing at +23 deg scan angle. Excessive cooling of the scanhead continues due to extremely cold ambient air temps (-71 C). Excessive heating of the digitizer also continues, with temps reaching almost 50 C inside the unit. There were numerous dropped scanlines during the flight. Areas of dropped lines within the data set are highly correlated with regions of significant air turbulence and buffetting.


Spectral Summary
Spectral Band Configuration (final)
Spectral Response Files (final)

Level-1B Data Distribution
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center DAAC