Helicopter on RV Lance

By piggybacking on Germany’s IRO-2 project, through which a prototype system for sea-ice forecasting and ship routing is being developed, ESA carried out the SMOS-ice field campaign in March 2014 to validate the ice-thickness data product from SMOS. Battling cold and storms, vital ground-truth information was gathered by an electromagnetic sensor suspended from a helicopter. The helicopter and team were carried on the RV Lance, which sailed into the polar sea-ice from Svalbard, Norway.