At NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, crews inside the hangar work to install a newly developed carbon-dioxide sensing tool onto an HU-25C aircraft. In coming weeks, the aircraft will fly several missions to test and calibrate the instrument, which is called ASCENDS CarbonHawk Experiment Simulator, or ACES for short. Attached to the belly of the HU-25C, it uses lidar technology to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The tool was conceived and assembled at Langley and is a prototype for a device that could one day orbit the Earth as part of a squadron of NASA satellites monitoring Earth’s atmosphere. This photo, shot from outside a window of the passenger compartment, shows aircraft mechanic Dean Riddick guiding the ACES instrument into position.Image credit: NASA/David C. Bowman
