NASA is known for sending their ships to thousands of kilometers away from Earth, but also flies almost at ground level to combat pollution. The "flying laboratory" the space agency these days combing South Korea in its first foray outside the United States.
In July 1969 when Armstrong set foot on the moon, this aircraft Douglas DC-8 left the workshop to make its first flight. In 1985 he acquired the NASA and later modified it to make it the most sophisticated aircraft to assess air quality, able to cover the gaps in the current measuring devices.
"To understand how pollution is distributed in the country and how it affects people need this plane, because to understand what is down must also understand what happens above," he told Efe Jim Crawford, a scientist at the KORUS mission AQ.
A total of 45 passengers and 36 crew -9 scientists- equipped with 25 high-tech devices that give the interior an aspect of the plane spacecraft Hollywood made 8-hour flights almost daily to go almost the entire southern half of the peninsula Korean.
But they are not normal flights. Plan on Seoul just over 300 meters, lower than some city skyline or the coast of Jeju just 150 meters above the waters, it is an intense experience and also a risky task by two veteran pilots.
Among the team of scientists found two Spaniards, Roger Seco and Jose Luis Jimenez. The latter is a professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado and is hired by NASA as principal investigator aerosol mass spectrometer, one of the instruments that collect air samples in midair.