Earth Science From The Sky: The Next Generation

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NASA is taking to the skies to encourage a new generation of scientists to study the earth. The agency is hoping its new Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), a six-week session that includes research aboard a DC-8 flying laboratory, will get young people excited about solving problems like warming oceans, rising carbon dioxide levels and new pollutants in the air.

NASA is taking to the skies to encourage a new generation of scientists to study the earth.

The agency is hoping its new Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), a six-week session that includes research aboard a DC-8 flying laboratory, will get young people excited about solving problems like warming oceans, rising carbon dioxide levels and new pollutants in the air.

In recent years, American students haven't exactly been flocking to the field.

But if a recent pair of flights in California is any indication, SARP could help turn that around.

In The Air

Just minutes after the DC-8 takes off on its second SARP flight from NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif., more than a dozen students are hard at work on three different experiments to be conducted in what is scheduled to be a six-hour flight.

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As the plane flies low over the inland valleys of central California, Kamil Armaiz-Nolla, 29, and Daniel Tkacik, 23, work with several other students on an air-sampling experiment. A senior scientist from the University of California, Irvine, oversees their work, but doesn't interfere.

Every minute or so, Armaiz-Nolla twists open a valve that sends a sample of air from outside the plane into a stainless steel canister the size of an overgrown cocktail shaker.

The experiment will measure gases from dairy farms a thousand feet below. Cows belch up a lot of methane. And the process used to prepare their feed can raise levels of ozone, another greenhouse gas.

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