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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
That is great. Just as long as the automatic pilot isn't running on M$ Flight Simulator.
42 + 1 = 42
Why not just use an image satellite in the first place? The picture quality is good enough.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
hell, strap a fire extinguisher on there and go nuts!
(ok, so not really, but you get my drift)
Even if they have to "dumb it down" a bit, so that foreign powers can't use it against us, Drone aircraft have a number of applications, public and private.
I'm glad to see this, and I'll welcome more of it.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
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
Will this render the fire fighting dirtbike obsolete?
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
they say they look at fire, but they look at you!
I am cool with this as long as it rmains in the hands of government agencies, but not if these robitic planes are used for corporate surveillance, investigations of straying spouses, etc. etc.
The more this tech gets into use, and now the unmanned plane is going towards civilian applications, the more we need to irease privacy education in our culture.
Let's discuss these issues now and pass appropriate legislation. I don't want to spend all day craning my head into the sky, or watching corporations engage in surveillance arms races.
Goat sex free since 2001
Here's another example of how NASA tech coming "down to earth", as well as an earlier article about how NASA was helping fight fires (using satellites)
If God gave us curiosity
"Fight Fire with Arthur!" - The Tick, episode 1 of the live action series
Hmm... Arthur flies too...
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
We need that much technology to fight fires.What will be next, trees with automatic defense systems.(Uses AOL CD's to shield from flames)
There is probably a natural balance with the amount of combustible material in an area and the amount of moisture in that area. Once a thicket gets too dry, it burns for one reason or another. I find it interesting that the more we fight small to medium sized forest fires, the larger and more destructive the eventual large one is. It's all a balance, and we're helping destroy it one squirt of water at a time. The more we fight nature, the harder it fights back.
Cool technology, though.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
The article also mentions "floods, earthquakes and pollution events", pollution would make sense since there would be danger, but the others don't. But of course I'm not sure what the value of taking pictures of "pollution events" is either.
they have had these things for a while now, caught the article on the discovery channel or TLC a year or so ago - bah one or the other, I'll see if I can dig up the orignal article and post a follow up.
And I also like the idea of NASA producing stuff like this. It gives the agency some visibility, and opens the door for increased funding.
Still, as neat as this is, I would like to see other hardware adapted for firefighting. How about a firefighting cruise missile? Just load it up with fire retardant chemicals and smash it into strategic locations. You'd have no trouble with funding... We Americans LOVE missiles!
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Predator has the same strange looking tail. Anyone know why?
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
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
Yea, sure, that'd work, but then it'd have to take off and land once or twice an hour, which increases risk and limits it's time in the air doing what it was designed to do.
Look at it like computers. Windows machines are good for gaming, but they're average for servers. Unix machines are great servers, but average for desktops. It's better to have specialized equiptment: let everything do what it was designed to do, and dont try to make it do what it wasnt designed for.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
...when I read the title was "oh, another 'Armageddon-Deep-Impact-could-really-happen' story". I thought it was [fighting (fire from the sky)] instead of [(finghting fire) from the sky].
If we hook up these guys with the guys from boeing (here)[slashdot.org] we could fight fires at supersonic speed! I might patent this before Bill Gates does.
Get about 10 of them flying 24 hours a day, guided by sattelite and we would need a lot less fire fighters.
Hey you could even have a robotic refueling plane and the fire fighting drones would never have to land.
This sounds like a larger version of the aerial robots developed for Georgia Tech's International Aerial Robotics Competition. Although the amateur designed robots don't have the range of the NASA version, the winning designs can perform all of the tasks that the expensive counterpart can. And I'm sure for a fraction of the price.
-Dorsey
If you can't beat them, exploit them. *Then* beat them... -Milk & Cheese
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
if they ever got in trouble for performing 'test flights' over nude beaches?
Next time we need to chase a white Ford Bronco, I'll bet this is the thing used by all the news stations...
Make a vehicle for spying on Americans and pass it off as a fire fighting device... how clever
~ now you know
They've just reinvented the DC1 and a trained pilot... The DoA has been orbiting planes around wildfires for about 30 years and having the pilot report back to NIFC via radio. A billion dollars to replace a skilled pilot and plane: just when you thought that the U$ couldn't do anything more stupid...
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Things like this make me realize that periodically our massive defense budget does yield something good, the the internet... cool robotic planes...
Exactly.
Instead of modifying it to carry water, they should have designed it to drop water for 24 hours straight.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
BFD.
I live in Utah in a place were we're basically in a basin surrounded by mountains. We have fires all summer every year. Sometimes, if they're big enough they fill the whole valley up with smoke. It's pretty hard on the lungs. Some more fire control around here would be good. Our firefighters are burned out. But having some controlled burns would be good as well. That takes man power. On the flipside, in winter, all the exhaust from the cars fill up the place.
The Hiroshima bomb destroyed most buildings within a mile, so that's a two-mile diameter, so you'd need about five Hiroshima-sized bombs to have a significant blast effect over an area five miles across. That's 15 kilotons, so you'd need 15 x 5 = 75 kilotons, or 75,000 tons, or 150,000 pounds of conventional explosive. (Yeah, it might not snuff the fire, but the updraft under the mushroom cloud will tend to suck the fire inward and slow its outward travel -- ignoring the effect of flying flaming objects)
Maybe five aircraft would be more practical, but let's see if one can do it. It looks like a 707 or KC-135 can handle 150,000 pounds and have capacity for some fuel weight. I don't know what the safety requirements would be to allow unmanned flight for civilian use of something like that.
Now, about the foam.. The area of a circle 2.5 miles in diameter is 547 million square feet (pi * r^2), so if you're going to cover just the surface (not trying to cover all branches on trees) to a depth of one foot, you need 547 million cubic feet of foam.
One Goodyear Blimp has 202,700 cubic feet of helium, so we'll assume it can hold that much foam.
So, fill a 707 with explosives and strap around it 2,700 Goodyear Blimps full of foam. Probably want to add some more, as some of the foam will be vaporized by the blast. Well, might be easier to just drop the blimp-sized bags of foam separately. There ya go, it's all designed. The rest is just engineering.
So, why doesn't it exist yet?
Uhm - dumb idea really.
I've worked as a ham radio volunteer for CDF on a couple of fires so have been through some of the training concerning issues like this.
First - water weighs ALOT. Second, replenishing the supply quickly is an issue. You really want a heavy lifter that can have a fast turn-around and do more drops per hour. A small UAV isn't going to fill that bill.
Another interesting fact is that mapping out the fires in real time was done by the hams here in CA around 10 years ago, along with giving the CDF real-time video feeds of the fire from helicopters.
For doing the mapping, a GPS unit was tied to a Terminal Node controller (ham packet radio speak there) that just spit out the bits from the GPS. These were displayed on a map as the helicopter flew the perimiter of the fire. This same copter had a Amateur Television on it that could simultaneouly broadcast pictures back to the Incident Command. Point is that some versions of this basic idea have been around for quite a while.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
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.
One of my collage professors is currently working on a project named WITAS, an autonomous flying vehicle.
They're currently focusing on traffic supervision (The thing can search the roads for a specific car and follow it around and some other cool stuff) but supposedly theyr're also looking into other applications (such as fire monitoring and some other things)
Apparently, from what I understood from his lectures and from talking to him, they've been talking to, among other cities, Los Angeles, about using the helicopter for monitoring traffic gridlocks and things like that.
The human operator is able to communicate with the helicopter by talking to it, and the helicopter replies! It's really neat, check out the webpage for more info. They still have about 3-4 years to go on the project.
...the same type of drone that was shot down over Iraq (last week)? Don't know if it's the same size, but it certainly has the same form. So when the article says it has "cutting edge technology usually seen in military aircraft" wouldn't that be because it's essentially the same plane (sans whatever super-duper top-secret military stuff the mfg. wasn't allowed to include)?
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
"The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line September 4th. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug."
Here on the U.S. East Coast we're hearing about coast guard helicopters (the big ones) hovering over the beaches watching for sharks. (In response to a cluster of shark attacks) Now, call me crazy, but that's an awful lot of fuel to use just sitting there. Why not use these planes to monitor that too? Shouldn't be much difference, just a live camera feed to a ground station. An unmanned fleet of these would use a heck of a lot less fuel and manpower than hovering those huge helicopters.
This story was seen on the national news LAST WEEK. But seeing how people on here rarely leave their computer screens I should have seen it coming.
However, someone else suggested dropping a "water bomb" on the fires. Does anyone remember the movie "Outbreak" (or a made-for-tv-equivilent)? I'm not sure if its the right movie, but to stop the spread of the virus the military was going to drop a bomb that would suck out/remove the oxygen from the air. Would that extinguish the fires? Is the technology availible? Or am I just a retard?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The plane is a variant of the Predator unmanned surveillance aircraft manufactured by General Atomics and used by the U.S. Air Force.
The Predator is unpiloted. Completely, I believe. It flies, lands, and takes off all by itself. I believe it's similar to the Global Hawk, a surveillance plane that can fly an entire recon mission just from one person making two mouse clicks.
But they also say:
Wegener said the Altus II, which is controlled by pilots on the ground, still needed to clear a few hurdles
My own emphasis. Can anyone clarify this? They are calling it a robot plane (which to me suggests an unpiloted plane), but then they say it's remotely piloted (a rather different thing, I thought). My guess as to what it means is that either: a) they're going to make it unpiloted, but haven't yet, or b) It's 'sort of' piloted - it doesn't fly the whole mission by itself, but you have someone giving a good general idea of what to do most of the time.
Either way, a valuable project. It's through stuff like this that Artificial Intelligence, one of the most hyped up fields of research that ever existed, can have useful, visible products.
-- This post is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, Karma
Could this technology be mounted on dirigibles?
Would they be better for the task?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu