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Fighting Fire From the Sky
exceed writes: "Yahoo! News has an
article on an unmanned robotic airplane that is able to circle around wild fires for up to 24 hours, sending data and images back down to earth via satellite. The Altus II, created by NASA, employs cutting edge technology usually seen in military aircraft, giving fire officials a real-time view of fires that can burn over hundreds of thousands of acres. The plane could map dozens of fires and topographical features in a day, never endangering a pilot."
Space.com also has an article here. Similarly a good read for those of you that can't get enough.
.ph0x
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ps -aux | grep mind
What is the obsession with fighting wildfires?
They're usually in the middle of nowhere with few if any homes threatened. They're good for the environment - many plant species have evolved to require fire for germination, for example.
See, for example, this article
An image satellite does that and only that, takes a picture. THe system discussed in the article maps the landscape to include trees and possibly even leaves that fall off during autumn, two thigns that have a huge influence on how a wild fire spreads. They're looking to determine how the fires spread to study more effective ways of putting fires out when they happen.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
It has now become a sort of "death spiral".
You see, long ago (actually, not that long ago), before forest fire fighting was a "big" issue, forest fires occurred in their natural cycles, some big, some small - but most not radically devestating.
As people moved into the forested areas, along with a lot of hype by who knows who (someone with an axe to grind), people bagan to see these natural fires as "bad" - and something should be done (for the children!!!) - so, the fires got fought, and...
and...
The cycle was destroyed, leading the the forests gathering more "underbrush", that should have burned off long ago, but now continues to grow, where once it was just low stuff close to the ground...
When it does catch and burn, these huge conflagerations are "contained" (heh, there's a word - most of the time they burn themselves out after a lot of work has been done to get ahead, risk lives, cool them down with water, etc) - allowing the underbrush to continue to collect, until the next big fire.
I suppose they could just allow them to burn, but the problem is that they would burn the whole forest, and not just the undergrowth, which would be a bad thing.
What the USFS does today is controlled burns (which I would imaging sometimes get out of hand, and hence become forest fires - not sure how often, though) to kill off this underbrush, but really this isn't enough, because the areas covered by forest are HUGE, and they can't do controlled burns on all of it...
There really aren't any good answers to any of this, not without letting nature take its course, and risking an anhilation of an entire forested region (which may be what it takes - who knows?)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
well i assume that satellites cannot be in the places you want them nessecarily at the time you want them. a plane on the other hand can move around anywhere.
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Because of a number of reasons.
1. Satellite is in orbit and will have to be tasked, which wastes fuel and even then it's 90 minutes or more between pass.
2. Because a good satillite - Like a KH series is over a billion dollars, and a lower quality one like a SPOT or the Russian commercial grade sats are at least a 100 million.
3. Because a satellite will run out of fuel and be replaced every 3-5 years, even a 100 million is a hell of a lot for NASA or the Forest Service to shell every couple years.
4. UAVs are easier to move around than something in orbit, cheaper to lose and easier to build and upgrade when a next generation sensor comes out.
The Altus II was not developed by NASA, but by the ASI division of my employer, General Atomics. NASA's role was providing criteria to modify the existing Altus I.
Here is a link to the GA/ASI site.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Because it wouldn't work. I'm a Fire Fighter, and I'll tell you right now that no matter how much water you dump from a chopper, you're never, ever going to get everything out that's on the ground. You just can't dump water as accurately as say, a bomb. Now a water bomb would be interesting. But with hot spots and live fire down there, you need the smoke eaters to be chopping logs down, setting up fire blocks, and controlled burns. No amount of water dropping will slow a fire that is being backed by Santa Anna winds.
The higher, the fewer.
Try checking out what the scientific community has to say before spouting the federal government's opinions.
The poster is dead on. Under George W. policy's gotten goofier, primarily due to his administration's catering to logging concerns.
For a great book on the subject, see Year of the Fires : The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 by Stephen J. Pyne. He's a professor at ASU and was a firefighter on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for 15 years. Pyne's written a whole series of books on wildland fire, its behavior and its management.
This company wants to convert A-10s into fire bombers. Makes sense to me since they have a large payload capacity, excellent low level maneuverability and can fly at relatively slow speeds.