A low-flying NASA plane will sniff farm emissions over Texas from October 22

A twin-engine NASA research aircraft will fly low over farmland near Transit, Texas, from Thursday, October 22, through Monday, November 9, 2026, measuring the gases and particles that animal feeding operations release into the air. The plane is a NASA Dynamic Aviation A200, and it will carry more than a dozen instruments tuned to ozone, methane, ammonia and particulates. The flights start two days after publication, so residents near the route have not yet seen it overhead.

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NASA announced the Texas flights on October 15 and updated its notice on October 16, with the dateline credited to the agency’s Ames Research Center. The agency gave no specific flight altitude, but it describes the work as low-altitude and low-flying, and the measurements are meant to capture emissions from feeding operations as they leave the source.

The A200 and its flight window over Transit, Texas

According to NASA’s announcement of the Texas flights, the campaign window runs from October 22 to November 9, 2026, a stretch of about two and a half weeks. The aircraft will work over farmland near Transit. NASA does not publish a day-by-day schedule or hours, and the notice carries no aviation advisory, so the dates describe the span in which flights may happen, not a promise of flying on every day.

The A200 is operated by Dynamic Aviation, and NASA describes it as a two-engine aircraft. In the mission’s plan, the small aircraft is the one that goes to emission hotspots. The FarmFlux plan sends it to locations in California, Idaho, Texas, Colorado and Iowa across multiple seasons, with flights in both 2026 and 2027, and Texas is the first stop to be announced with dates.

What FarmFlux measures from the air

FarmFlux is, in the words of NASA Goddard’s campaign page, “a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital mission to study agriculture-atmosphere interactions.” Its four goals, as listed there, are to measure the magnitude of gaseous emissions of nitrogen-, carbon- and oxygen-containing gases, identify the environmental and management factors that control those emissions, track what happens to the gases after release, and evaluate emission inventories and model parameterizations to improve air quality and weather simulations.

The A200 half of the work focuses on animal feeding operations. The Goddard campaign page says the Dynamic Aviation aircraft quantifies emissions from animal feeding operations using mass balance, a technique that compares air flowing into a site with air flowing out, and that it concentrates on beef cattle, dairies, hogs and chickens. The instruments aboard are in situ sensors, meaning they measure air composition as the plane flies through it, along with measurements of the chemical, physical and optical properties of particulate matter.

NASA’s science page for the mission states the larger purpose as studying “the cycling of nitrogen between agricultural systems and the atmosphere.” The same FarmFlux mission page says the airborne instruments are faster, more precise and more compact than those of a decade ago, and that observations will help validate satellite retrievals and provide ground truth for inferred emissions. The page frames the work as four research questions: emissions near animal feeding operations, gas exchange over crop systems, the properties of particulate matter, and agriculture’s effect on regional air quality and on satellite applications. The Texas flights belong mainly to the first of those questions, since the A200 flies over livestock operations while the P-3 covers crops.

The four gases and particles named in the notice cover different parts of the farm-to-air pathway. Ammonia and the nitrogen-containing gases connect directly to the nitrogen cycling that the mission page names as its subject, methane is a carbon-containing gas, ozone is formed in the atmosphere from other pollutants, and particulates are the tiny solids and droplets that the instruments characterise by chemical, physical and optical properties. Measuring them together lets the team see how a farm’s plume changes after release.

Goddard, Colorado State and Boston University

The campaign is jointly led by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, Colorado State University and Boston University. Boston University hosts its own FarmFlux project page, and NASA’s Earth Science Project Office keeps a FarmFlux campaign entry for the logistics side of the deployment. The Goddard page lists a “FarmFlux Leadership Team” contact without naming individual principal investigators, and the announcement credits no individual spokesperson, so the institutions themselves are the named parties behind the work.

The Texas flights are the opening phase. NASA says a P-3 Orion will fly additional low-altitude research flights from March to July 2027 over cropland in the Midwest and California’s Central Valley, which matches the plan for the larger aircraft to survey major U.S. crop systems while the A200 covers livestock operations. For anyone on the ground near Transit, the practical expectation, based on the announcement, is a research plane working low over the fields for a few weeks.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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