Behind the scenes: NASA's DC-8 'flying lab' takes to skies in Northwest

Space shuttles. Moon landings. Mars. For most people, extraterrestrial topics come to mind when they hear "NASA." But much of the U.S. space agency's work is done right here on Earth.

In the Pacific Northwest, for example, NASA’s “Olympic Mountain Experiment” is underway. Dubbed OLYMPEX for short, the effort is to help the agency validate and refine data collected by a global precipitation measurement (GPM) satellite launched in 2014. The high-tech weather satellite, considered the most advanced ever flown, is able to quantify rain and snowfall around the globe. Eventually, it could help provide data for ocean areas and remote swaths of land that have historically been hard to track.

One of the tools helping NASA in the OLYMPEX project is the agency’s unusual Douglas DC-8 flying laboratory. The jet took to the air for the first time in 1969 — the same year NASA landed a man on the moon — and flew for Alitalia and Braniff before the space agency converted it to a research platform in the 1980s.

Today in the Sky contributor Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren recently got a behind-the-scenes look, both at NASA's OLYMPEX activity and onboard the agency's DC-8 flying lab. He shares his story in a photo essay (above). And readers who'd like a more in-depth look can check out the photo gallery below for extra behind-the-scenes coverage.

Photos: NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory

Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren is a Seattle-based photojournalist and aviation writer and a contributor to Ben Mutzabaugh's Today in the Sky blog. You also can follow Jeremy on Twitter at @photoJDL.

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