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On August 17, 2010, Terry Lathem flew through a hurricane to pick up some bacteria. He had a huge smile on his face. “It was the longest, most thrilling seven hour flight of my life,” he says. “Each passing hour provided new bursts of adrenaline as the storm intensified, lightning flashed in the distance, and heavy rain streamed across the windows.”
A month later, he was at it again.
On both occasions, he flew aboard an old DC-8 plane, which had been retrofitted into a flying laboratory. With him was a team of NASA scientists, who were taking part in the agency’s ambitious GRIP experiment—a mission to study how hurricanes are born. They hit two hurricanes in six weeks—Earl and Karl.
Aside from taking environmental reading, the flights were also surgical operations. Their mission: to biopsy the storms. As they criss-crossed Earl and Karl, they sucked in the surrounding air into sampling tubes. These filtered out big droplets or ice crystals and retained everything else—gases, dust, minerals… and bacteria. That was what Lathem was out to find. And he found...
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