We looking to identify the next class of airplanes. We need to know what the observational requirements are. We need to identify sensors. We're not ready for any review. We just want to start the dialogue and education process. This will help us bring the right people to the next session to get some answers.

What we're looking to do today is to review platform classes as well as the missions.

Daughter Ships. A lot of what our users want is a daughter ship. These are small lightweight vehicles, electric powered battery driven. It's carried to a location, deployed with its own sensor package, it may be able to communicate with its mothership or a base. It may be expendable. It depends on the mission for the exact specifications. The collection of missions we have here were chosen for the representation of it capabilities.

Small UAV Class A. This can fly across the Atlantic. It has a 2kg payload. This is for boundary layer work. It is a $20-25K platform. There is some degree of expendability.

Small UAV Class B. This has a little more payload capacity. This can be networked. This could be for a fire mission

Medium UAV Class. THis is a bit more complex. For example, the Predator B. This has a day + duration.

Large UAV Class. Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk is the state of the art. It has about 36 hours of endurance. It has a lot of loiter time.

Very Long Endurance UAV Class. This is Helios. This is the one that spent an hour at a certain altitude. It is solar powered, very lightweight. It has a multi-week to month long endurance.

Comment: It's not capable of 160 hours right now. It was never flown to prove this. It crashed during the test.

If we had enough sun it would.They hoped to get 3-4 days endurance. There was no regenerative on this. They had solar cells for day time.

This is more of our vision and not actual results right now. This capability is within reach. It's more dollars than technology that stand in the way of making this happen. Hopefully with the successful vehicle systems propulsion, we may be able to see this in 5-6 years.

The missions identified for this session are:

• Hurricane Genesis, Evolution, and Landfall
• Cloud, Aerosol, Water Vapor, and Total Water Measurements
• Active Fire, Emissions, and Plume Assessment
• Southern Ocean Carbon Cycle
• Antarctic Explorer (Cryosphere)
• Vegetation Structure, Composition, and Canopy Chemistry

The assumptions across all missions are:

• OTH network centric communications
• ‘File and fly’ access to airspace
• ‘Plug and Play’ open architecture
• Capable of 100% nominal autonomous sensor operation

We are going to assume that the air traffic control needs are met. We need to assume that any of these missions are at least 5 years out. We don't want any of those considerations to be our roadblock. As these go forward there will be another team that looks at that.

Q: Can you identify a champion for each mission? Someone who has claimed ownership?

A: Yes. Cheryl had a workshop that identified that. Each group identified with a mission they had more interest in. There is a lead PI for each of these missions. We don't have investments in the communication systems yet.

We are looking at a lot of different parameters of a phenomenon. The science objective for this is the observation of hurricanes to improve predictions of hurricane paths and landfall. You want to go out and not spend a lot of time transiting out to the source and then track it slowly back. Remote high altitude measurements include precipitation, clouds, meteorological sounding, electrical activity, microphysics and dust. Though I'm not sure about the electrical activity.

Q: If i look at the surface of the ocean and the UAV goes through the hurricane and makes a deep dive, that's a lot of transit.

A: It may be that the UAV is unrecoverable. It's going to have a lot of excess power capability. I don't know if the boundary layer vehicle will be doing any of that.

The tropospheric vehicle is outside the hurricane which is outside the cyclonic cycle. The airplane needs to be very robust. It may not be recoverable because it has to go through the storm. As far as penetrating the microphysics of the wall, they want to get in situ measurements and be able to infer storm detection. It doesn't have to be a daughter ship.

It might be good to write the performance requirements for each of these platforms. Such as how high and propulsion requirements.

Dropsondes weigh about 2.4-4 pounds. If you have enough money, you can get them to cigar size. There's an outfit in Florida that makes those. The payload is really 200 kg. The desired weight is 1000 lbs. The 200kg comes from a budget restriction.

You want the mothership should be above the hurricane the entire time. There will be no vertical profiling. It needs to linger above the disturbance as long as it takes.

Q: We would like to have a speed capability. Your high attitude loitering vehicle is a data collection vehicle. Do you consider disposable 24-hour dropsondes?
A: That's the idea of daughterships. You could airborne launch the data collector. You could eject every 10 miles and now you have a pattern around the storm to collect data. Right now they want to be able to infer information from satellites.

Q: What kind of propulsion system would be appropriate for these dropsondes?
A: We don't know the answer to this but this is the kind of thinking we want.

In order to get up to 65K feet, you're looking at a wing span of 240 feet. This is not a small airplane. When you think about how much liquid hydrogen that would take the cyndrilical tank would be 10-12 feet internally.

It depends on the time frame it needs to be delivered. The majority of the fuel will be used on the climb up. It's good to think about how to get around that.

If a plane can fly high and slow it's not going to fly fast very well. We've been trying to think about where to fly from . Kennedy is a great place. What if the hurricane hits southern Florida? Where would be land?

We can also provide power from the ground and beam it up.

What about drop tanks? We could carry enough extra fuel to let them go.

The concept of propulsion would be greatly simplified by the profile. It lends itself to a launch vehicle, such as a dirigible. It could drop it off and let it climb from 20k.

Then it would be like having grandmothers, mothers and daughters.

Many of the vehicles we're talking about fly at speeds slower than the winds they're going into. For example, one time Helios landed backwards.

Q: What are the peak power requirements?
A: What we've listed here is the payload power. The forward power is somewhere between 150-300 horsepower.

Q: Have you decided that electric power is the solution?
A: No. This is just an initial cut at the idea. It's more likely that it will be hydrogen cell.

The biggest aerosol out there is water. The science objective for this is to study transformations of aerosols and gases in following cloud systems

• Convective systems
• Sea breeze cloud formation
• Marine stratiform
• Contrails in the Central U.S. in air traffic regions
• Synoptic scale systems & Fronts
• Cirrus outflow

There is some remote sensing of gas. Usually for gas they go out and use in situ measurements. This is mostly tropospheric type efforts. A lot of the interests is in the tropics. You're talking about 50k feet.

Even the ER2 isn't cranking out this stuff. When you get into your lidar and radar, they're going to want control.

Would this include de-icing? There are some heating requirements and I imagine that would be considered in payload. The platform has to have that capability.

Would you expect sensing would be a partially dictated power plant? What about sensing the water trails? One of the things they choose to do is position the sensors away from the power source. Any time you're looking at in situ, the community at large believes slower is better. Spectral data collection requires loitering over one spot as long as they can. It simplifies the inlet design. So in this perspective supersonic is not good.

This will be tropospheric ozone. If the sensor is on the nose, it's away from the exhaust. That's how we measure ozone right now.

Q:The question is not that these will compromise the results, but will it pollute the ozone?
A: That's something we want to consider.

If i'm going through clouds, I'm going through higher levels of moisture. There is a need for de-icing. Typically we want them to fly in a coordinated position. Right now I have them trying to fly in formation but they fly at different speeds so it's tricky. They do pretty good right now with the power variance. In the future, we may not have as much variance.

You have at least 3 different airplanes with this. This implies that everything has to be a UAV. This could be a mix of manned and unmanned.

We want to make intelligent investments right now. Your input will help us do that. With the data we have here right now, I can't tell you exactly what we have. Laser benches are about the size of 2 of these desks. When you're trying to do new measurements, they need unobstructed views.

I don't see any convective storms that last for longer than a short time. They want to map out entire areas. They want to do profiling of long segments of the atmosphere, not just storms. A lot of this is calibration data from the satellites.

The research community is talking about their basic research. They'll say we have an intense observation period and see what impacts the model more. They'll validate it with the satellite data.

Measurements:

• Atmospheric chemistry
• Thermal intensity time-series
• Plume composition: volume, albedo, particle size distribution
• Fuel type and quality

Lidar is probably picking up more particulates. This is a medium to a slightly smaller craft. They'll be wanting to fly in formation, somehow coordinated above each other. They will fly in stacks to measure the same elements.

You're still a couple of thousand feet above ground level because of the fire probably. There is some terrain avoidance. They want to get fairly low to measure the plume. They may be flying in hilly country. If they're not looking at the thermal energies, they can stay higher. But they do want to get fairly close to the source.

The assumption is that there will be a substantial lack of oxygen in the environment they fly in.

How tightly do you have to check the trajectory? I am not aware of any trajectory requirements. The remote sensing platform is sending vectors to the in situ.

The only one that wants to have precise trajectory is in mapping with lidar and radar, in which position knowledge is critical.

Q: Do you know if you need to fly into the plumes? There is tremendous heat.
A: Yes.It's not flying into the flames.

Q: What do you get from flying into the plumes instead of 1/2 mile in front of it?
A: I don't know, but it's likely that the chemistry will change. I don't know what they do with the data. Their job is to ask questions.

Q: If you have a remote sensing platform dedicated to wildfires, wouldn't you want to have a payload that's useful to the forest service?
A: They're not really interested in using UAVs in fire detection. There is probably a counterpart to this which is the volcanoes.

Not all these fire are going to be Kansas grass fires. Some will be in the mountains which will affect performance. I was thinking that gas turbine will be a possible solution.

Measurements

• Winds
• CO2
• Sea state (obstacle avoidance)
• Surface temperature

They're going to be in the area and can use a small platform UAV. For every 150m/sec they can take a sample. This is their collection resolution. This is what they want the sensor to be capable of. For a small UAV that is fast.

There are small platforms right now that can fly very low. I would be more concerned at 10meters that I'm going to run into a wave. And if I have 10m waves, there's probably a wind driving it.

There are about 5 vehicles concurrently for this. There seems to be an avoidance problem, not only waves, but ice and other vehicles. I don't know what else they're trying to avoid.

This carbon cycle is very important for the heating up of the atmosphere. Carbon sequestration is the biggest issue in the greenhouse effect. You have sequestered in the tundra and in the oceans. What's going to happen if they start releasing?

The science objective is to provide data for validating simulations of the dynamics of ice and land topography, iceberg volume, glacier profiles and glacier channel profiles and to provide data on the effect on the ocean environment.

Measurements

• Time dependence of ice and land topography
• Coastal and open ocean salinity temperature, and currents, at surface and beneath iceberg depths
• Time evolution of targeted iceberg freeboard volume, land glacier profiles, and glacier channel profiles
• Atmospheric boundary layer observations at high space/time resolution

Some of this stuff you cannot get through satellites.The lidar adds the issue that the beam has a geometric cone shape. You can't get the definition you need. The radar also has some issues of accuracy and resolution by flying lower.

When they have an event, they would want a quick sortie generation effect, such as a calving. They may drop a GPS device to help with their survey, but probably they're using radar for their surface and lidar for the topography. THey may drop buoys. There are 2 different types of missions" heavy flying but you can schedule it and the other is event-driven.

Q: If you're using lidar and you have winds, can you still take measurements?
A: It's a good question. You need to have fairly calm situation. That didn't get addressed. You need a good gimbal system.

We need to question what the propulsion challenges are here. The systems aren't designed to operate at below 35 degrees Fahrenheit.

Q: Was there a need to have Arctic operations in the winter?
A: They want to have all the seasons. They want to measure all the seasons on the decay and the build up of the glaciers.

A lot of this is in the Brazilian rainforest.and what are the effects of the deforestation. The science objective is to provide 3-dimensional vegetation structure and information on composition and chemistry

Measurements

• Terrestrial biomass
• Leaf-level chemistry (eg. lignin, xanthophylls, etc.)
• Water canopy content

Here they show they need to use the medium platforms. They want to have a hyperspectral imager. One of the difficulties I have is that the synthetic apertures are looking sideways. Because we also do multi-spectral is looking at nadir, so we have to do multiple passes. It's not very cost effective. It's possible to have multiple bands and do it all in one pass.

In the UAV-SAR may be able to do this. It will replace the Air SAR. Right now we have 3 band, multiple operator. To cut the new UAV SAR down to size, it may be that we can't have all bands on one vehicle.

On the land side it could be that you have a virtual baseline and have a group flying out there in formation. That's how we can get 40m resolution. I could collect the same data in this way. It would give us some forest canopy measurements.

They'll be flying over biome transects. They'll want to refly their lines relatively close to another mission. The endurance is about 12-24 hours. The seasons of interest are every season but at a particular time each season.

If we had CO2 buoys out there, we would want to fly over them too. We want to coordinate with the flux towers. They'll be set up somewhere in the canopy. The UAVs are probably not going to be flying in the canopy itself.

This is predominantly green forest and rainforests. For this one, it's going to be a cost issue.

A number of these we looked at could focus on current assets. We aught to decide which ones we should tackle. We need to focus on the power and propulsion challenges.

Let's go through each mission and see where we already have assets. We need to look at what we know of each of the requirements to see if it's sufficient.

Hurricane. We have nothing today that can do it. We don't understand the mission requirements well enough to know what we need to do. There are three platforms we'd have to work on. You're not going to want to have daughterships in the middle atmosphere. They're too heavy. You could do the smart dust. You'll have to bring the mother down to pick up the daughters. Maybe you need to have a babysitter. The anticipated time is FY09-10.

Clouds. The convective platform seems to be the biggest challenge. Payload power is higher than the other ones, but maybe that's not that much of a challenge.

Fire. The low platform, but the in situ one is to be determined. If you can't process the smoke and particles through it, that will be a problem. The above one we're okay on. What would be the impact of a tethered instrument dragged through the plume?

Southern Ocean. There could be potentially a lot of climbing and low level avoidance with a big spiral up to do vertical profiling. We need to get more information on this one. Are there any implications for ship buoy operations? What about recovery? Airship? Is this doable with what we have? Let's try to get better data on this by tomorrow.

Antarctic. Is temperature a ground operations issue. If you use JP4, you can withstand significant temperatures. In the winter it is 85 below. I'm sure you would have a heated hangar. The rescue mission had to get waivers for permission to be there at that time. They have multiple focus areas.

Vegetation. This seems mainly like we already have capabilities for this one.

The first three look like we have the most challenges. The last three seem probably with our current technologies. There may be some additional information we need to get to be sure of that.

Q: What about fuel?
A: It seems that we have to use available fuel, such as jet fuel. Other places we say that we need hydrogen cells.

Q: How do we handle this?
A: From a science perspective, propulsion has never been questioned. We'll use the cheapest more available one that will work. I imagine we can use hydrocarbon fuels for any of these last three. I'm not sure on the first three.

Q: What about power? There seems to be a difference between the quality of power in terms of weight.
A: In terms of the infrared sensors, the signal to noise ratio is impacted by the noise on the power system. They are very concerned with the noise of the power system. You cannot get it too clean.

On the DC8, part of the cost savings is because they have a controlled environment, and they make the equipment as lab friendly as possible. I would bring in one of the sensor folks to address this. I'd look at the weight trade offs. That needs to be a standard for all these platforms.

You want to put all your power on a weight loss program.

Is there any technology we cannot do? When do we see these missions taking place? International polar year is 2006-2009. It's an opportune time to pull out some budget for this project.

Let's not worry about budgets for right now. With a new director, we're hoping the budgets will go up. We'll keep the notion of frugality, but let's not have it limit our thinking.

Let's get the rest of the timeframes for the other missions. Otherwise, we'll focus on the 3 regions of Hurricanes, the middle section of Clouds and the low area of Fire. Put your thinking caps on and we'll see you tomorrow.