Forest fires were tracked by UAVs that can see
through the smoke.
© Getty Images |
Some can fly higher than piloted craft. The altitude record for a powered
aircraft, 29,500 metres, was set last year by Helios, a super-light,
solar-powered UAV made by AeroVironment, an aeroengineering company based
in Monrovia, California. More robust UAVs can cruise at heights
considered too low for manned craft. And with no lives at risk, they can
enter extreme environments such as thunderstorms or the smoke plumes
above volcanoes. |
| Fire Watchers |
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The vehicles have already been involved in some impressive experiments.
Jim Brass, a remote-sensing expert at NASA's Ames Research Center in
Moffett Field, California, has used Altus, a modified version of
Predator, to study forest fires. His team equipped the aircraft with
visual and infrared sensors that could see through smoke. In September
2001, they used these to follow the hot spots of a Californian wildfire,
and had the images on the Internet in just 15 minutes. |
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But UAVs will really come into their own when they can be used to study
interactions between Earth and atmosphere. Brass's team hopes eventually
to fly a UAV over the Amazon. He thinks it could be used to track daily
changes in the gases released by the forest. "We've never been able to
run a 24-hour flight over an ecosystem before," he says. |
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Ramanathan wants similar capabilities. His project, the Indian Ocean
Experiment, is designed to study the particles that seed cloud formation.
The research area is the entire Indian Ocean - far too large for
conventional planes to cover. So Ramanathan wants to use teams of three
UAVs in parallel. One will monitor particle formation at the ocean's
surface, another will fly through the clouds, measuring their chemical
and physical properties, and a third will take readings from above the
clouds. Plans are at an early stage, but Ramanathan has started talking
to AeroVironment's Paul MacCready, the designer of Helios, about what
kind of UAV might be suitable. |