Nasa's Solar Aircraft to Demonstrate First Commercial Applications

source: press release NASA 2002.02.03

This summer, look for a solar-powered airplane to glean
meaningful data about Hawaiian coffee crops, when it is not otherwise
engaged in demonstrating state-of-the-art telecommunications
applications.

NASA and commercial researchers are planning the missions to
confirm the practical utility of high-flying, remotely piloted,
environmentally friendly solar aircraft.

Using a lightweight flying wing called the Pathfinder-Plus,
the researchers will operate from the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile
Range Facility (PMRF) at Barking Sands on the island of Kaua'i. Last
summer, the team from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center and
commercial partner AeroVironment, Inc., flew the larger Helios
Prototype solar airplane from PMRF to a record altitude of 96,863
feet.

This summer's first two operations, co-sponsored by
AeroVironment and their telecommunications customers, are tentatively
scheduled for mid- to late June. They are aimed at a large segment of
the uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) market for which AeroVironment,
Inc., developer of the solar-electric flying wings, believes the
aircraft are uniquely suited-as airborne platforms for commercial
telecommunications relay services.

"The first planned telecom demo is a third-generation mobile
application providing two-way data rates of up to 384 kilobytes per
second to a mobile user on the ground, suitable for video
transmission to a handheld device, as well as for other voice and
data transmissions including Internet access," said Stuart Hindle,
vice-president of strategy and business development for AeroVironment
subsidiary SkyTower, Inc. "The second telecom demo is a digital high
definition television application providing a picture-perfect video
broadcast signal to a fixed receiver on the ground at twice the
resolution of conventional broadcast transmissions."

Hindle noted that for the telecom applications, the
Pathfinder-Plus and its on-board transceiver, flying above the
weather at 60,000 feet, would act like an 11-mile tall tower in the
sky, doing the function of a geostationary satellite but without the
time delay. According to AeroVironment/SkyTower chief executive
officer Tim Conver, just one of the firm's solar-electric aircraft
could provide broadband local access services at "over 1,000 times
the capacity of a typical space-based satellite, be deployed at a
fraction of the cost of cable and DSL, and be set up in a matter of
days."

The third demonstration, planned for September, will find the
Pathfinder-Plus soaring aloft on a three-flight coffee harvest
optimization mission. While the flying wing loiters overhead at about
20,000 feet altitude, compact cameras will record spectral images of
the Kaua'i Coffee Company plantation, the largest coffee plantation
in the United States. The resulting color images will help growers
determine which fields of coffee are ripest for harvest on a given
day.

"Our objective is to demonstrate how this solar-powered UAV
can be used as a platform for the acquisition and immediate use of
high-resolution imagery," said principal investigator Dr. Stan
Herwitz of Clark University, Worcester, Mass. "It is important to
note that coffee is only one of many commercial UAV applications that
we foresee using our imaging payload."

Following the flights, the research team will share the
results of the study with the plantation manager, and the data will
also be available to agricultural interests around the world on the
Internet.

The coffee study is one of two demonstration missions funded
by NASA's Earth Science Enterprise over a multi-year period to
demonstrate the utility of UAVs for Earth science and commercial
applications.

"The Navy at Barking Sands established a working relationship
with us on previous research missions, including the record altitude
flights," said Jeff Bauer, Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor
Technology (ERAST) project manager at NASA's Dryden Flight Research
Center, Edwards, Calif. "We plan to continue that relationship with
this summer's missions and future missions now being planned."

"The Pathfinder-Plus aircraft is available as a test platform
for research and development of commercial missions," Bauer added.
"If the customer has the funds, we have the capability."