From The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory
At
6.13.24
Daniel Stolte
Media Contact
Niranjana Sahasranamam Rajalakshmi
Science Writer
niranjanar@arizona.edu
Research Contact
Jack Holt
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory
jwholt@arizona.edu
520-621-6963
Ski-equipped deHavilland Otter aircraft on Bagley Icefield, Alaska, during NASA’s Operation IceBridge, a previous airborne program. Snow4Flow will use similar aircraft instrumented with multiple radars and a scanning laser altimeter to map snow depth and ice thickness over many glaciers and ice fields including this one, which is the largest ice mass outside of Antarctica and Greenland. Jack Holt
Jack Holt
A University of Arizona-led project that uses advanced airborne radar mounted to low-flying aircraft to study arctic glaciers is one of six new missions that have received funding by NASA.
Dubbed Snow4Flow, the mission is led by Jack Holt, a professor in the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and the Department of Geosciences. It is one of only two missions, selected from 42 proposals, to be funded at $30 million. Four other projects will each receive $15 million.
The funding, announced April 19, comes from NASA’s Earth Venture program, which focuses on missions that use instruments mounted on aircraft to make measurements that cannot be made from space.
Snow4Flow’s goal is to get a better handle on the snowfall feeding into glaciers and how fast those glaciers move. In combination with climate models, this will allow researchers to make more accurate predictions about how glaciers shrink and grow, and how much they contribute to sea level change, Holt said.
“Those glaciers are retreating fast, and they’re making a large contribution to sea level rise, but we don’t know exactly how much and how that’s going to change in the future,” he said. “Right now, we can’t accurately measure how much snow feeds into the glacier systems, and without knowing their ice thickness, you don’t know the volume of ice flowing out from the glacier. Those are things that you can’t measure with satellites from space.”
Snow4Flow is designed to address a critical need of climate scientists in their efforts to develop accurate projections of sea level rise from the melting of land glaciers. Across four major study regions representing many hundreds of glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere – Alaska/Yukon, southeastern Greenland, the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and Svalbard archipelago in Norway – the Snow4Flow team will use microwave and long-wavelength radar sounders mounted to low-flying aircraft to measure snow accumulation and glacial ice thickness. The resulting data will inform models of glacier dynamics and their contributions to sea level rise.
One of Alaska’s most iconic glaciers, the Malaspina Glacier spills out from the St. Elias Mountains onto the coastal plain as a “pancake of ice”. Around the world, glaciers are threatened by a warming climate, and scientists need as much data as possible to refine climate prediction models. This photo was taken during a previous NASA-funded mission tasked with measuring annual changes in the thickness of glaciers, sea ice and ice sheets. Brandon Tober/University of Arizona
While Holt’s team will focus on studying glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, the group expects the data collected over the course of the five-year project will be applicable to glaciers in other parts of the world. The measurements can be used to calibrate observations from different satellite missions, allowing scientists to monitor glaciers from space and improve models that predict how glaciers across the globe will behave and respond to climate change.
Snow4Flow centers around two instruments: one with low-frequency radar that generates the very long wavelengths needed to penetrate thick ice sheets, and another that operates at shorter wavelengths and is optimized to probe blankets of snow.
“We will mount them to small aircraft – fixed-wing, helicopters or both – which will fly low over glaciers that pass through mountain valleys,” Holt said. “During those flights, we will collect data that essentially produce cross sections of the snow and glacier ice thickness.”
“At the same time, these missions improve our ability to use satellites by calibrating algorithms that attempt to use spaceborne data for such purposes,” he said.
The Snow4Flow team will use microwave and long-wavelength radar sounders mounted to low-flying aircraft to measure snow accumulation and glacial ice thickness. Russell Mitchell
Rather than having science and instrument teams defined at the time of the proposal, the projects selected for the NASA funding will be open to other scientists who are interested in applying to join the effort. Holt expects to have a final team assembled by fall 2025 and to begin flight operations in spring 2026. The mission will take place over three years, capturing winter snowfall before snowmelt begins in the summer months.
Holt attributes Snow4Flow’s success in attracting federal funding to a strategic cluster hire at the university that included Ali Behrangi in the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences and Chris Harig in the Department of Geosciences, through the university’s Earth Dynamics Observatory [“EDO”]. In cluster hires, multiple scholars are recruited into one or more departments based on shared research interests. Behrangi studies snowfall in high-latitude, high-altitude regions and Harig studies ice mass loss using gravity measurements from space satellites.
“The University of Arizona’s continued success in attracting this level of research funding is a direct consequence of our efforts to focus our recruitment in key areas in which we offer unparalleled expertise and strength,” said University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins. “Snow4Flow is a perfect example of such an opportunity, in which our researchers will get to assemble a dream team capable of developing solutions to some of the most pressing challenges of our time.”
The university’s Earth Dynamics Observatory, or EDO, combines UArizona strengths in space exploration, instrumentation and Earth sciences to learn more about our planet. Collecting information about Earth from space provides new information about how Earth systems work, how they are changing and how humans might anticipate and respond to changes.
Behrangi, a professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences, said the observatory played a crucial role in the success of the Snow4Flow proposal “by encouraging innovative thinking, allowing the team to break free from conventional ideas and envision a broader, more impactful mission instead of settling for smaller, less ambitious proposals.”
“These large federal programs are increasingly interdisciplinary, where they need teams assembled from many disciplines to come together and answer the big science questions of the day,” said Harig, an assistant professor of geophysics. “Jack (Holt) was able to use our expertise within EDO to refine the project idea over the last few years and be very well positioned when the solicitation finally came out.”
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The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is a research center for planetary science located in Tucson, Arizona. It is also a graduate school, constituting the Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona. The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is one of the world’s largest programs dedicated exclusively to planetary science in a university setting. The Lunar and Planetary Lab collection is held at the University of Arizona Special Collections Library.
The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory was founded in 1960 by astronomer Gerard Kuiper. Kuiper had long been a pioneer in observing the Solar System, especially the Moon, at a time when this was unfashionable among astronomers. Among his contributions are the discovery of Miranda and Nereid, the detection of carbon dioxide on Mars and of methane on Titan, and the prediction of the Kuiper Belt.
Kuiper came to Tucson looking for greater independence than he had enjoyed at The University of Chicago, the chance to build a community dedicated to solar system studies, and also to be closer to southern Arizona’s many potential sites for world-class observatories, such as Kitt Peak National Observatory (founded in 1958) [below]. LPL was established under the auspices of the University of Arizona, with Kuiper serving as director until his death.
The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory’s endeavors are truly interdisciplinary. The accumulated knowledge and techniques of astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, geophysics, geochemistry, atmospheric science, and engineering are all brought to bear upon the single goal of studying planetary systems. Many students come to The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory having studied only one or two of these subjects in detail, so a broad-based curriculum is essential.
In 1973, the university established a graduate Department of Planetary Sciences, operating continuously with The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. This provided an administrative framework for The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory to admit graduate students and take a greater role in teaching. The Lunar and Planetary Laboratory’s chief officer is simultaneously “head” of the department and “director” of the laboratory.
The University of Arizona enrolls over 49,000 students in 19 separate colleges/schools, including The University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson and Phoenix and the James E. Rogers College of Law, and is affiliated with two academic medical centers (Banner – University Medical Center Tucson and Banner – University Medical Center Phoenix). The University of Arizona is one of three universities governed by the Arizona Board of Regents. The university is part of the Association of American Universities and is the only member from Arizona, and also part of the Universities Research Association.
Known as the Arizona Wildcats (often shortened to “Cats”), The University of Arizona’s intercollegiate athletic teams are members of the Pac-12 Conference of the NCAA. The University of Arizona athletes have won national titles in several sports, most notably men’s basketball, baseball, and softball. The official colors of the university and its athletic teams are cardinal red and navy blue.
After the passage of the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, the push for a university in Arizona grew. The Arizona Territory’s “Thieving Thirteenth” Legislature approved The University of Arizona in 1885 and selected the city of Tucson to receive the appropriation to build the university. Tucson hoped to receive the appropriation for the territory’s mental hospital, which carried a $100,000 allocation instead of the $25,000 allotted to the territory’s only university Arizona State University was also chartered in 1885, but it was created as Arizona’s normal school, and not a university). Flooding on the Salt River delayed Tucson’s legislators, and by the time they reached Prescott, back-room deals allocating the most desirable territorial institutions had been made. Tucson was largely disappointed with receiving what was viewed as an inferior prize.
With no parties willing to provide land for the new institution, the citizens of Tucson prepared to return the money to the Territorial Legislature until two gamblers and a saloon keeper decided to donate the land to build the school. Construction of Old Main, the first building on campus, began on October 27, 1887, and classes met for the first time in 1891 with 32 students in Old Main, which is still in use today. Because there were no high schools in Arizona Territory, the university maintained separate preparatory classes for the first 23 years of operation.
Research
The University of Arizona is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. UArizona is the fourth most awarded public university by National Aeronautics and Space Administration for research. The University of Arizona was awarded over $300 million for its Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) to lead NASA’s 2007–08 mission to Mars to explore the Martian Arctic, and $800 million for its OSIRIS-REx mission, the first in U.S. history to sample an asteroid.
The LPL’s work in the Cassini spacecraft orbit around Saturn is larger than any other university globally.
The University of Arizona laboratory designed and operated the atmospheric radiation investigations and imaging on the probe. The University of Arizona operates the HiRISE camera, a part of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
While using the HiRISE camera in 2011, University of Arizona alumnus Lujendra Ojha and his team discovered proof of liquid water on the surface of Mars—a discovery confirmed by NASA in 2015.
The University of Arizona receives more NASA grants annually than the next nine top NASA/JPL-Caltech-funded universities combined. The University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is actively involved in ten spacecraft missions: Cassini VIMS; Grail; the HiRISE camera orbiting Mars; the Juno mission orbiting Jupiter; Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO); Maven, which will explore Mars’ upper atmosphere and interactions with the sun; Solar Probe Plus, a historic mission into the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time; Rosetta’s VIRTIS; WISE; and OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. sample-return mission to a near-earth asteroid, which launched on September 8, 2016.
The University of Arizona students have been selected as Truman, Rhodes, Goldwater, and Fulbright Scholars. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, UArizona is among the top producers of Fulbright awards.
The University of Arizona is a member of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy , a consortium of institutions pursuing research in astronomy. The association operates observatories and telescopes, notably Kitt Peak National Observatory just outside Tucson.
Led by Roger Angel, researchers in the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab at The University of Arizona are working in concert to build the world’s most advanced telescope. Known as the Giant Magellan Telescope (CL), it will produce images 10 times sharper than those from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Telescope.
GMT will ultimately cost $1 billion. Researchers from at least nine institutions are working to secure the funding for the project. The telescope will include seven 18-ton mirrors capable of providing clear images of volcanoes and riverbeds on Mars and mountains on the moon at a rate 40 times faster than the world’s current large telescopes. The mirrors of the Giant Magellan Telescope will be built at The University of Arizona and transported to a permanent mountaintop site in the Chilean Andes where the telescope will be constructed.
Reaching Mars in March 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter contained the HiRISE camera, with Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen as the lead on the project. This National Aeronautics and Space Agency mission to Mars carrying the UArizona-designed camera is capturing the highest-resolution images of the planet ever seen. The journey of the orbiter was 300 million miles. In August 2007, The University of Arizona, under the charge of Scientist Peter Smith, led the Phoenix Mars Mission, the first mission completely controlled by a university. Reaching the planet’s surface in May 2008, the mission’s purpose was to improve knowledge of the Martian Arctic. The Arizona Radio Observatory , a part of The University of Arizona Department of Astronomy Steward Observatory , operates the Submillimeter Telescope on Mount Graham.
The National Science Foundation funds the iPlant Collaborative in with a $50 million grant. In 2013, iPlant Collaborative received a $50 million renewal grant. Rebranded in late 2015 as “CyVerse”, the collaborative cloud-based data management platform is moving beyond life sciences to provide cloud-computing access across all scientific disciplines.
In June 2011, the university announced it would assume full ownership of the Biosphere 2 scientific research facility in Oracle, Arizona, north of Tucson, effective July 1. Biosphere 2 was constructed by private developers (funded mainly by Texas businessman and philanthropist Ed Bass) with its first closed system experiment commencing in 1991. The university had been the official management partner of the facility for research purposes since 2007.
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