NASA Air Pollution Campaign Concludes with Flights on July 29

WASHINGTON — NASA’s DISCOVER-AQ air quality field campaign will take to the skies over the Baltimore-Washington traffic corridor and northeast Maryland one last time on Friday, July 29, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. EDT.

Flights by NASA’s P-3B and UC-12 aircraft are part of a mission to enhance the capability of satellites to measure ground-level air quality from space. DISCOVER-AQ, which stands for Deriving Information on Surface conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality, is a NASA Earth Science Division research effort conducted in collaboration with the Maryland Department of the Environment, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several universities.

Flights between the Washington Beltway and Baltimore will follow Interstate 95. The P-3B will fly at low altitudes over the study region. The P-3B is a large, 117-foot, four-engine turboprop. It will fly as low as 1,000 feet above the ground. The P-3B also will make spiral ascents and descents over six locations where air-quality measurements are being made from ground stations.

A detailed map of the P-3B’s low-altitude flight path is available at: http://go.usa.gov/ZiP

For more information about the DISCOVER-AQ mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/discover-aq