Mission: Recovery IS-2
Priority: Medium
 
Poor weather conditions west of the Antarctic Peninsula, near the pole hole and in areas where remaining IceBridge baseline and high priority missions are located prohibited us from flying one of those today. Instead we headed back across the Weddell Sea to fly the medium land ice Recovery IS-2 mission in an area where multiple missions have been completed and where the weather has been favorable since our campaign began.
 
The Recovery IS-2 mission is a new one for OIB and was produced specifically with ICESat-2 in mind. This mission surveys the Recovery Glacier channel along 6 IS-2 ground tracks, with targeting of the strong beam in the beam pairs. The science goals of this mission were successfully accomplished, and all data instruments had no issues, collected 100% along the flight lines.
 
The 6 ICESat-2 ground tracks that were flown and their latency between the IS-2 crossovers are listed below:
Line 0002, dt = 71 days
Line 0322, dt = 1 day
Line 0581, dt = 18 days
Line 0520, dt = 14 days
Line 1343, dt = 68 days
Line 0337, dt = 2 days
 
Fun Fact: The Recovery Glacier got its name due to the recovery of vehicles that repeatedly got stuck in crevasses during the Trans-Antarctic Expedition that occurred in 1957. 
 
Outreach: During the mission today, 3 classroom chats were conducted with all US schools. We were able to reach 67 students today, bringing our total so far during this campaign to 340.
 
Outlook: We are hoping that weather patterns will shift in the coming days, allowing for IceBridge to attempt missions west the peninsula.
 
Attached Images:

1. Map of today’s science mission (John Sonntag/NASA)
2. Screenshot of the ATM wildlife and precise navigation display, known to the DC-8 aircrew as "the bubble display", during today's mission.  Here we are steering around known wildlife colonies (magenta circles with a "stay out" radius of 2 km) in the Shackleton Mountains. (John Sonntag/NASA)
3. Grease sea ice tendrils forming at the edge of the Filchner ice shelf. Newly forming sea ice floes in the foreground. (Jeremy Harbeck/NASA)
4. Triangle iceberg surrounded by many different types of sea ice off the Larsen ice shelf in the Weddell Sea. In the open water, grease ice is forming. Also featured is newly formed thin ice flows, and thicker ridged ice flows.  (Linette Boisvert/NASA)
5. The wing of the DC8 over the Recovery Glacier, with the Shackleton mountains in the background. (Jeremy Harbeck/NASA)
6. An extremely large iceberg off of the Larsen ice shelf encased with thicker, ridged sea ice. (Linette Boisvert/NASA)