"We were looking for the bed of the ice and out pops Camp Century," said Alex Gardner, a scientist at NASA's California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a Nov. 25 news release. Though it's been well documented over the years, their data - captured by an Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar attached to the belly of the aircraft - revealed the lost structure in a way that's never been seen before.
"You can see the scale, you can see the size of it, you can see individual structures and tunnels," Greene told SFGATE on Monday. "Really amazing." The fact that they stumbled across it at all, especially while navigating severe weather conditions leading up to the flight, made their discovery even more remarkable.
Because the environment was so extreme and unpredictable, the research team developed about 25 different flight plans, Greene told SFGATE. As conditions slowly worsened, the scientists anxiously wondered whether they'd be able to collect data at all.
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