South Korea, First Foreign Country To Join NASA's Mission Against Pollution

Two ex U.S. Air Force pilots have taken off from Osan Air Base in South Korea to join in a very different kind of battle.

In a joint work with NASA, former U.S. Air Force pilots are in charge of a flying laboratory, a modified DC-8 packed with millions of dollars worth of highly sensitive instruments to register air pollution. This will determine where the pollutants originally came from and analyze how air pollution can be accurately measured from space.

According to CNN, this plane is not like any other plane. The report said that most of the windows on the plane have air tight probed or filters sticking out of them. There are also instruments at the top and bottom of the plane's body. As soon as you walk inside it, you will notice that most seats have been replaced by state of the art machinery that was specifically designed to pick up gases from ground level up to tens of thousands of feet.

Nicola Blake, one of the 34 scientists on board and working at the University of California, is the one responsible for collecting air samples that will be shipped back to her laboratory where it will be testes for different kinds of gases.

"We need to understand, we need to know what's going on," she says. "It's great to look at things with satellites and a lot of them are new and they're reporting great data, but unless you actually physically measure the atmosphere in situ, you're very limited."

It was found that the perfect venue for this kind of mission is in South Korea. The country ranks 172 out of the 180 countries for air pollution in a recent study by Yale University. It was also in the same study that it was revealed that almost half 50 percent of the world's population is breathing dirty air, and more than 3.5 billion people are living in countries with unsafe air quality, kitv.com reported.

Scientists on board have been up in the air for today, flying the length and breadth of the country, over cities, mountains and seas. Looking out of the window you see dramatic views of Seoul while flying just 300 feet high -- flying this low over a metropolis of 10 million people is rare and bumpy. But instrumental in finding out exactly where certain air pollution is coming from.

Alan Fried has worked in his field for 35 years, measuring formaldehyde and ethanol in the atmosphere. "We fly over certain sites and we can tell when we're immediately over those areas, there's high pollution, so this is a really sensitive instrument."

The South Korean government has always argued that much of the pollution in the country apparently comes from China. Certainly so-called yellow dust is known to be blown in from the deserts of Mongolia and Northern China. This brings some toxic particles that are picked up along the way, however fine dust particles which are very harmful to one's health, may originate far closer to home said the number of science experts on board.

Jack Dib, responsible in collecting filter samples expects much of the pollution to be local. "We think a lot of it is going to be a mixture of pollution from the power plants and the cities with an awful lot of stuff coming from the forest, natural biogenics so we're looking to see if that's what's really happening."

South Korea is the first foreign country to enter into this kind of mission with NASA. And South Korean scientists on board are working alongside the Americans, suggesting the government is at least acknowledging pollution here is a problem and is looking for answers.