On February 6, 2025, after years of preparation and four months of intense planning, an aircraft with an advanced NASA instrument took off for the AVUELO campaign’s first survey in the tropics, while teams on the ground spread out to collect ground-truth data.
On February 6, 2025, after years of preparation and four months of intense planning, an aircraft with an advanced NASA instrument took off for the AVUELO campaign’s first survey in the tropics, while teams on the ground spread out to collect ground-truth data. The Airborne Validation Unified Experiment: Land to Ocean (AVUELO) is a partnership between NASA, the Smithsonian Institution’s Tropical Research Institute, and the Costa Rican Fisheries Federation, as well as universities and institutes in the United States and Panama.
AVUELO’s goal is to calibrate a new class of space-borne imagers for tropical vegetation and oceans research. These data will eventually help us understand how the thousands of tree species and marine organisms create unique ecosystems.
Day one, though, was a nail-biting, adrenaline-fueled day as we waited to see if plans for aircraft flights and the coordinated fieldwork would come together or whether the team would go back to the drawing board. Many members of the team had done similar projects in many regions, but each airborne project has its own unique features.
The weekend before, the teams had been thrilled to watch maps on the flight tracker as the twin-engine turboprop aircraft left California for Texas, then stopped in Mexico for fuel, and ultimately arrived in Panama.
Read more at NASA Earth Observatory
