Award-Winning NASA Video Captures Human Side of Science

NASA videographer Jacob Shaw recently earned first place for outstanding documentation for his film, Reflections, which chronicles the 2024 Airborne Science mission PACE-PAX, short for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem Postlaunch Airborne eXperiment. This documentary-style footage was filmed handheld with manual anamorphic lenses to immerse viewers in the PACE-PAX mission and highlight its cinematic scale and complexity.

In September 2024, NASA’s ER-2 aircraft was used to help validate data from the PACE satellite, launched in February 2024. Based at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, the ER-2 flies at altitudes up to 65,000 feet, making it well suited for this high-altitude science mission. A team of pilots, safety engineers, and aircraft technicians from NASA Armstrong worked alongside scientists and engineers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as well as researchers from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the Naval Postgraduate School, and other institutions. The data gathered will support scientific understanding of Earth’s oceanic and atmospheric processes.