We have seven snakes loaded,
and we have seven snakes in the belly.
Oh it started back in the 80s,
and I think it's because of the serpentine looking tubing.
I don't know, some grad students,
I came in one day and they said
the cans were all snaked up.
So they've been called snakes ever since.
It becomes a problem when you are shipping canisters,
though, to places that actually have snakes.
The long name would be Whole Air Sampler,
but in science everything has an acronym.
So we're WAS.
We actually collect the air completely unfiltered.
We bring air in from outside.
it goes to a pump, gets pressurized,
goes into an evacuated can.
All these canisters are evacuated in our laboratory.
Pressurized to about 40 psi
and then the valve is closed.
Once the valve is closed then that can is done.
And then we go to the next can.
And we can sample as many as 168 canisters per flight.
We can swap out - these will all be full -
put in empties and ship the filled ones
back to our laboratory so they can get analysis going.
We measure three or four different kinds of gases.
We measure gases that destroy stratospheric ozone.
We measure gases that are greenhouse gases.
We measure gases that come out of the ocean, from different kinds of bugs.
We measure gases that are given off by biomass burning.
We measure gases that participate in urban pollutions - smog.
So we'll quantify a hundred gases, and in some cases,
gases that have never had any kind of
a global sampling like this project.
So what do we expect to learn?
I don't know.
I guess it's a little bit like asking Lewis and Clark
what did they expect, you know, besides trees.
But they knew they were gonna find something cool.
And we always do.