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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
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
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.
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
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
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
A derailed, burning railroad tanker full of toxic waste is a pollution event, and I can imagine that pictures could be a useful aid to assessing the situation. As far as it relates to firefighting:
I don't have the answers to any of those questions, but I think you can see that the issue isn't quite so straightforward.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
My guess is that it is a cheap form of stealth, to reflect radar pulses up instead of down.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Could this technology be mounted on dirigibles?
Would they be better for the task?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu