NASA Ikhana Assists SoCal Firefighters

ackthpt writes "Ikhana (a NASA drone) is primarily designed for suborbital earth sciences missions, but may be fitted out with a variety of sensors. Wednesday, Ikhana took off from Edwards Air Force Base for a 10 hour mission to observe forest fires in California, scanning the terrain from 23-25,000 feet using a variety of sensors for visible and IR light. Able to remain aloft for up to 30 continuous hours Ikhana serves up information in minutes, a process that takes hours when done by manned aircraft observation. 'The data is processed on the aircraft, up-linked to a satellite and then downloaded to a ground station. From there it's delivered to a computer server at NASA Ames. The imagery is then combined with Google Earth maps. Command center personnel can view the images on their computer screens and then delegate local firefighters accordingly.'"

Comments

Awesome

[Hadlock]

Cut out the middle man (NASA) and you've got basically what they can do in Battlefield 2 from the Commander's view. Another five years and it'll stream straight to the google maps server for this specific function. We've already given google a nasa air strip, it's not long before we'll be giving them our tax dollars to leverage google maps/earth for more purposes beyond recovering crashed aircraft and scouting wildfires.

NASA waste

[bill_mcgonigle]

Can we please de-fund NASA and start spending that money on something with real immediate benefits to the folks here on Earth?

Oh, wait...