The prop speed increases on the Basler aircraft. On board is the specially developed Polaris-radar and its inventors, the two expectant researchers Jørgen Dall and Anders Kusk. Soon, the plane will take off for a flight above Antarctica's approx. 30 million cubic kilometres of ice.
"When I look out of the window, it's just white, but on our radar it's something else. Here, we get red and green shades showing that we can see through the ice and measure its thickness," says Jørgen Dall, a professor at DTU Space.
Knowledge about the melting of the ice is crucial for being able to calculate the consequences of the ice melt. And this is precisely why the two researchers have embarked on a two-month climate mission in Antarctica.
The mission has been organized with support from the ESA (European Space Agency) Biomass mission, which so far has focused on mapping the uptake and emissions of CO2 from the world's forests using a satellite. Now, the researchers will investigate whether ESA's satellite can also be used to monitor the ice in Antarctica, and they are therefore testing a DTU-developed radar system.
