OIB completed the high priority Svalbard North mission.

OIB completed the high priority Svalbard North mission.
This mission was designed to sample sea ice on the eastern hemisphere side of the Pole, within the Russian FIR boundary which had formerly been off limits to OIB.
A portion of the return leg to Longyearbyen was along an ICESat-2 ground track.
In addition to Level 1 Requirements SI1 and SI2, this mission addresses sea ice level 1 baseline requirement SI3d by sampling sea ice in the eastern Arctic.
We also coordinated an overflight with the 2Dgrees expedition party, they arrived on the sea ice on April 4 at 88N latitude and 150E longitude and are taking snow depth measurements on their way to the North Pole along a portion of our flight track.
We passed directly over the expedition party at 13:16:05Z and saw them in the DMS, CAMBOT, and FLIR images.

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The weather forecast for the mission showed mainly clear skies with some clouds on the southern portion of the line near Svalbard and haze near the eastern most end of the line.
Haze was indeed present along the southern portion of the line on both the outbound and return legs, and there was also some near the North Pole.
But the haze was thin enough for all instruments to see through and collect good data for most of the mission, with about 15 minutes of ATM data lost on the southern portion of the line due to clouds.

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