NASA prepares to fly plane low over Colorado to study cow farts

Alright, let’s just get this out of the way: NASA is about to fly a plane very, very low over Colorado farmland, and they say it’s to study cow farts. That’s the official explanation. You can believe it if you want.

Starting in October, a twin-engine King Air A200 aircraft operated by Dynamic Aviation will make a series of low-altitude research flights over agricultural land near Greeley as part of a NASA mission called, and we are not making this up, “FarmFlux.” The plane will be loaded with more than a dozen sensors designed to measure ozone, methane, ammonia, particulate matter and “other pollutants rising from agricultural lands and animal farms.” The mission is jointly led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, Colorado State University and Boston University. According to NASA, agricultural emissions represent “an important and understudied part of Earth’s land and atmosphere systems,” and the sensors will help researchers understand how gases from livestock operations and fertilizer interact with the atmosphere. After the Colorado flights wrap up, the plane heads to Amarillo, Texas, for another round from late October through early November, followed by a larger deployment in 2027 using a NASA P-3 Orion aircraft over the Midwest and California’s Central Valley.

So to recap: a government agency is flying a plane packed with classified-sounding sensor equipment at unusually low altitudes over rural Colorado, focusing specifically on farms and feedlots, and they named the mission “FarmFlux.” If you’re the kind of person who sees a strange plane flying low over a field and immediately texts your group chat “y’all seeing this???,” congratulations, this time you’re technically right that something weird is going on. It’s just that the weird thing is taxpayer-funded methane detection, not anything involving little green men. Probably. The flights can be tracked in real time at NASA’s Airborne Science Program Tracker, which is exactly the kind of transparency that proves it’s all above board, or exactly the kind of transparency a really smart cover story would include. We’re just asking questions.