ROAD SHOW
NASA’s Ikhana, a science and research version of the Predator. All photos AUVSI.
Ground Control NASA’s Unmanned Aircraft Work Covers Agency’s Past, Present and Future By Danielle Lucey
C
an he put his hand on the mouse?”
A gaggle of media were gathered at NASA’s Global Hawk Operations Center at the Dryden Flight Research Center to learn about the agency’s unmanned aircraft. A photographer, eager to get an action shot, repeated his request of the Global Hawk’s pilot. Through the glass wall, the plea was ignored. The media were gathered as part of an educational day, organized by NASA Dryden and AUVSI, on the
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capabilities of unmanned aircraft and how the agency is using them in a good portion of its cutting-edge research. And this moment was education enough for many of the journalists: The pilot didn’t need his hand on the mouse to control the Global Hawk’s flight back to California. This, newcomers, is what flying an unmanned aircraft looks like. The flight team sat in a dark room designed after a traditional airplane’s cabin and cockpit. Consisting of
Unmanned Systems — November 2013 Read us online at auvsi.org
a safety officer, a pilot, a copilot and a missions director, the Global Hawk’s crew was guiding the aircraft back to Dryden after completing its fall mission, gathering hurricane data off the Atlantic Coast. En route, the aircraft was collecting even more environmental data — not a moment of flight to waste. The aircraft winged along the U.S. southern border to avoid high air traffic areas and at that moment was gathering information from an area much affected by hurricane activity, the coast of New Orleans. Even more elusive to the onlookers was the science crew gathering NASA’s data. That team sat in another glass-enclosed room, except they were nowhere to be seen at Dryden. In this moment comes the journalists’ full-on reality check: The plane is in Louisiana, the pilots are in California and the researchers are in Virginia. And this kind of flight expertise NASA is honing could be what, one day, hands the keys over to new users of unmanned aircraft.
Airspace Integration Efforts NASA is feeding its data on unmanned aircraft to the many involved groups and regulatory bodies enabling the Federal Aviation Administration to integrated unmanned aircraft into the National Airspace System by 2015 — a task ordered by Congress. NASA’s work on the project began in May 2011 and will continue through September 2016 to review the critical needs that have to be addressed for this to occur, according to Laurie Grindle, the project manager for the UAS Integration in the NAS project at NASA.
The first phase of its testing, which is now complete, focused on modeling and simulation. NASA has rolled these simulations into 19 different mission profiles involving 17 different aircraft. The agency will put those concepts into an airspace-wide simulation that looks at the impact of widespread unmanned aircraft use and how that will affect air traffic controllers. This will eventually lead to integrated flight testing. The testing has also focused on the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast sensor, or ADS-B — a satellite-based sensor that will likely help fill the senseand-avoid gap often cited as an issue with unmanned aircraft integration. These tests occur at Dryden’s simulation lab, and simulation doesn’t mean that no aircraft are getting off the ground. Sam Kim, lead engineer, focuses his integration work on live virtual constructive-distributed environment tests. These test flights integrate Dryden’s work with yet another NASA facility, NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., about five hours north of the Dryden facility on Edwards Air Force Base. If you think of the problem of assuring sense and avoid and proper separation of aircraft in the airspace, “it’s a pretty large system to model,” explains Kim. The virtual live constructive scenario allows one plane to be flying at Dryden while another flies over Ames. However, the two environments can be overlapped in a simulation so it appears the aircraft are flying in the same airspace. The FAA could soon leverage this safe testing method. Kim says that Dryden will be hooking up with Langley Research Center in Virginia to allow the six unmanned aircraft test sites, due to be selected by the year’s end, to do simulated flying in the same fashion.
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Environmental Monitoring While one flight team was busy bringing a Global Hawk back to Dryden, a second team had completed the same task the day prior, landing the very first Global Hawk ever built on a 30-plus mph windy day, common weather at Edwards. The pair of aircraft are part of NASA’s Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel program, which for the past few years has looked at how hurricanes form off the Atlantic Coast. The aircraft monitor cloud particles and use dropsondes to gather information on how hurricanes form and what role Saharan winds play. In addition to the Global Hawks, Dryden is home to NASA’s only modified Predator aircraft, the Ikhana. Typically outfitted with science tools, the aircraft will soon have a dual use. In spring, NASA will put an ADSB on the aircraft to perform live aircraft simulations for the agency’s National Airspace System project that will explore civil use of the aircraft. “Companies like FedEx and UPS are very interested in this,” says NASA’s Don Johnson. The aircraft will also have an Inmarsat communications link that will allow it to fly in the Arctic for science missions, an area recently opened by the FAA for unmanned flights. It will be the first time the system can go north of 60 degrees latitude. Ikhana will also head to warmer climates for fisheries work in a protected area offshore Hawaii that involves the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard. “To do it by boat or manned aircraft is fairly limiting,” says Johnson.
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“It’s a great capability we are finding an interest for,” adds Ikhana pilot Mark Pestana.
Looking Ahead Though Global Hawk and Predator are current marquee aircraft names, NASA’s history of using unmanned aircraft dates back to 1962, when it began testing remote controlled models. A slew of follow-on programs continued, like the MiniSniffers used for atmospheric research in the 1970s and the 1980s tailless X-36 demonstrator, which laid the groundwork for concepts just now appearing on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Even Predator’s origins can be found at NASA, through the Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology program from the 1990s and early 2000s. The program spurred many unmanned technologies, and NASA historian Peter Merlin explains that some furthered their missions once the U.S. went to war after the September 11 attacks. NASA’s experimental unmanned aircraft days are far from over, however. The agency recently wrapped up work on the X-48 blended/hybrid wing body and has the X-56 multi-use technology testbed in the pipeline for continuing work. Much of this unmanned aircraft effort actually feeds into the safety of manned aircraft technology. The X-56 is focused on how different sets of aircraft wings, with varying levels of rigidity, can alter aircraft energy efficiency, research that could translate to commercial aircraft. Also, NASA is working on a project called PETRA, or
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the Prototype Technology Evaluation Research Aircraft, which is a roughly 11 percent scale model of a Boeing 737. Bruce Cogan, director of that program, sees the model’s job as a bridge between wind tunnel testing and flight testing for high-risk technologies. The aircraft will come to Edwards sometime in 2014 after initial work in Georgia under a Small Business Innovation Research initiative, where they will do loss of control and aerodynamics research. Dryden also has a program, called Auto-Ground Collision Avoidance System, which uses an unmanned aircraft, NASA’s Droid, to safely test software that avoids crashes. Ground collisions are the leading killer in flying, with more than 100 deaths per year in general aviation from controlled flight into terrain — pure pilot error, according to NASA’s Mark Skoog. In 2011, the program began working with unmanned aircraft to mitigate those situations. “It’s actually easy to prevent running into the ground … but the real issue is letting a pilot fly close to the ground without running into it,” he said. The test bed for this was the Sierra Nevada range, where topography changes quickly. The program has had both manned and unmanned flights, with no crashes. Often, Skoog says, the F-16 pilots will believe they’ve pulled themselves out of a crash, when in fact the software was actually responsible. The software leverages mapped ground information to pull aircraft out of potential crashes. F-16s have limited onboard computing space, so NASA had to put a simplified version of the terrain onto a module that flies onboard and uses the aircraft’s GPS system for more information. For unmanned aircraft, the information doesn’t
The NASA Global Hawk Operations Center at Dryden Flight Research Center.
have to be onboard. The team fit a world map’s worth of topography information on a chip that sits inside the cell phone of the operator. Dryden’s Director of Research and Engineering, Brad Flick, says these types of shrinking components, advances in computing power and making affordable electronics are what’s driving the unmanned aircraft revolution that’s been occurring at Dryden for more than 50 years. “Dryden’s had a long history with unmanned aircraft systems,” he says. “ … We find ourselves now at one of the next revolutions in aviation, the application of UAS technology into our everyday lives. … The challenge we are faced with now is when and how to apply this new capability that’s been enabled by this technological leap.” Danielle Lucey is managing editor of Unmanned Systems.
Operation Arctic Shield 2013
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program is collaborating with the U.S. Coast Guard and the University of Alaska‐Fairbanks (UA‐F) to test and evaluate oil spill detection. The Coast Guard needs a robust ability to respond to oil spills in the far reaches of the Arctic. NOAA and UA‐F will utilize the Puma sUAS to demonstrate sUAS capability in oil spill detection, monitoring, and recovery operations.
U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy ‐ Credit: USCG
Read us online at auvsi.org
PUMA UAS Operations Team ‐ Credit: NOAA
Launching Puma at Sea ‐ Credit: NOAA
Contact Robbie.Hood@noaa.gov
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