I am sure everyone who read my first post will be desperate know how my day turned out…! Well, somehow, my train arrived in Kiruna on time, despite setting off 1h45 late. And in a lucky twist, the ARA had taken off late and so landed late at 3pm local time.
So James and Nicola picked me up from the station, and I got to the hangar at the same time as the aircraft. In another twist of fate, Seb who was on the afternoon’s crew list was not actually going to fly. So there was a space for me to fly! That shower and change of clothes would just have to wait…
Being the first science flight, we we all super-keen and there was an overabundance of mission scientists, meaning that as a lowly additional extra, I didn’t have anywhere to plug in my laptop from the seat that I was in. Alas, my laptop ran out of battery half way through, so I wasn’t able to monitor the measurements in real-time for the second half of the flight. As we were flying at low level for most of the flight, the seatbelt sign was on so I couldn’t even get up to charge my laptop elsewhere. Instead, I took lots of photos of the land that we were flying over, as (a) I was lucky enough to have a window seat and (b) the amount of methane coming out of the ground will depend on the vegetation cover, so it’s a useful record of that. (NB I haven’t got the time data from the flight as I write this, so I can’t link the photo times with their locations right now. If I have time, I’ll do that once I get hold of that information. It’s a bit too hectic in the middle of a campaign to get all the data in the right place – especially as I’m writing this in my hotel room late at night!)
Dr Michelle Cain, University of Cambridge
Photos courtesy of Michelle Cain, University of Cambridge
Click here to read the original blog.