Solved: U-Shaped Contrail near San Francisco [NASA502 Survey, again]

[Mick West]

Several tweets about this today:





I'm assuming these are near real-time, as people tweet from their phones. That would put this one at around 12:50 PDT (UTC-7) 19:50 UTC.



It appears to be looking due south, from:
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.798...ata=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s-sPfAqWdNiby8oINnOIJgw!2e0
View attachment 8450

This seems to be the culprit:



And it turns out we've see him before. NASA 502, a survey plane
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/u-turn-contrail-near-san-francisco-nasa-survey-plane.3654/

And here's today's track, still in progress:


http://flightaware.com/live/flight/NASA502

The Google Earth track is attached, and from the spot in the above photo, looks like:

 

[deirdre]

sweet I needed a capital D for my collection!

 

[scombrid]

That would put this one at around 12:50 PDT (UTC-7) 19:50 UTC.

Took a train from SFO to Berkeley today. Came out of the tunnel from under the bay just before 1pm local. Looked out the window and saw that and thought, "I bet that makes the web today".