NASA LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER 1917-2017
Taking Care of our Rarified Air Langley Scientists at Work By Edward Goldstein
As the seagull flies, it’s roughly 90 miles from the windswept dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the Wright brothers first flew in 1903, to Hampton, Virginia, where the Langley Research Center was founded 14 years later, in part to understand the effect the atmosphere has on the problems of flight. Those early Langley National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) researchers quickly determined that there was a lot more to learn about the atmosphere than just going outside and breathing in the humid mid-Atlantic air. And that’s why today, as part of a scientific enterprise that spans the globe and beyond, Langley scientists like Michael Obland can find themselves detailed to America’s most northern town, Barrow,
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Alaska, where the Arctic tern flies, while working on a campaign to fly over the vast icy expanses of the North Pole in search of new insights about the composition of the thin layer of atmosphere that sustains us. “We’d get all geared up, wander down the street, warm the instruments up, get the plane out, and go fly across the frozen north,” said Obland. “It was an amazing experience for me, coming from the
