Slashdot Mirror
Solar Plane Breaks Endurance Record
calmond writes with this excellent snippet from CNET News: "QinetiQ Group PLC claimed Sunday that its propeller-driven aircraft called Zephyr flew for 83 hours and 37 minutes non stop, more than doubling the official world record set by Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk in 2001. The Zephyr is much different from the Global Hawk, which is about the size of a fighter and requires runway for taking off and landing. Zephyr, on the other hand, is an ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber aircraft that weighs less than 70lbs and is designed to launch by hand. The little aircraft flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon arrays covering the aircraft's paper-thin wings. It is powered day and night by rechargeable lithium-sulfur batteries that are recharged during the day using solar power."
Manned aircraft still have that record beat. Humm several days in an airplane... What fun.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If it was that easy, they could just go to one of the poles where the sun never sets for half a year. Though I suppose the ambient temperature and low angle might be a letdown. On an equally unrealistic note, to travel with the sun at equator it'd have to do 40000km in 24 hours = 1667km/hour. Yes, we can make planes that fast OR planes that lightly glide using solar power but I'm pretty sure we won't get both at once.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7577493.stm
Yea Goddard's liquid rocket was a waste of time. It only flew 40 feet and couldn't even carry a payload! The idea was nice, but it was nothing more than a child's toy.
Seriously though, it's a step towards making long term solar powered flight work. Creating aircraft able to keep flying indefinitely on solar power is not trivial. Once we can make it work though, then it's time to start scaling it up and sticking payloads on it.
A solar powered aircraft able to stay in the air for months or years at a time would be a hell of a lot cheaper than a satellite while being able to perform many of the same jobs.
These little planes might be useful in disaster situations, when ordinary comms are down. Wi-Fi capability has already been crammed into the SD card form factor. Seems likely that a very light weight Wi-Fi access point could be constructed as well. With that, how many of these planes would need to be launched to provide a communications network over an area wrecked by an earthquake or a flood?
If I get to set my own rules, I can break records, too.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Seems that the path is not that simple. If I start at daylight and travel to the pole it will be 1/4 circumference and it would be morning again on the other side. So more like 400kph?
Sulfur is a relatively cheap material, so lithium-sulfur batteries have the potential to be less expensive than other battery types. With a lower starting cost to manufacturers, lithium-sulfur batteries could save consumers money. There is also a possible cost savings because lithium-sulfur batteries tend to provide much longer charges than lithium ion batteries. With double the lifetime or greater, you might be able to get by with a single lithium-sulfur battery for your laptop or rechargeable hand tool. Another reported advantage of lithium-sulfur batteries is their ability to work well in very cold weather. www.wisegeek.com
Nope. The whole thing was built only to be mentioned on Slashdot.
Actually, it doesn't need to be daytime for it to operate, hence how it was able to stay airborne for 83 hours. It uses high capacity batteries to get through the night.
Amnesty International
According to the BBC article it carried a 2kg payload. That's enough for a decent observation and communications platform and this is only a prototype - they're talking about a much bigger version that could stay aloft for months.
Sion Power make the Lithium Sulfur batteries and they claim an energy density that's almost twice that of Lithium Ion. If that's true the power shouldn't be too much of a problem once the UAV's reached cruising altitude. It would be good to know some more about those batteries...
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
as your own cite says: the FAI "sanctions all record attempts." It's not a record, especially since they apparently self-officiated.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If my hunch is correct, then QinetiQ isn't very upset by not being listed as a world-record-breaker with this flight. Qinetic is a military contractor. Unless I'm completely mistaken, this plane being constructed with so much carbon fiber, wouldn't it have a very small (perhaps non-existent) radar signature? I'm sure it could carry a small payload, like reconnaisance cameras, for instance? All that plus no need to refuel, and I'd say that the military would be very interested in contracting QinetiQ to build a fleet of these for them. I'd also imagine that you could include a satellite uplink to the payload, and never have to even have the thing land in order to download it's recorded recon data.
i never want to meet the man who launches this aircraft by hand
I think the claim to have beaten the Global Hawk by 2x is a bit misleading - it implies a doubling of existing capabilities. In fact, it only UNOFFICIALLY doubles an OFFICIAL record, which itself is not the longest flight recorded by any means. In 1989 a Boeing UAV named Condor flew over 58 hours, and had a design endurance of 80 hours. Okay, they never claimed it as an official record, but it was still a valid flight, just like this was.
Here's an interesting video:
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/boeing-condor-uav/4285692709
And some facts:
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=7988
Granted, the Zephyr is theoretically limited only by the service life of its electrical components - it could stay up until something broke or wore out. But please, let's use real facts here.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
I was of the hope that I would know how its flight ended. Sadly, the entire story does not mention this. Anyone in the know about how this magnificent plane's flight ended...or did it crash?
Or why didn't they just let it continue flying after all it had an endless supply of "juice."
QinetiQ CIA link
QinetiQ, the British defence and security technology company that was spun out of the Ministry of Defenceâ(TM)s research laboratory, has appointed George Tenet, 53, former head of the CIA in America, a non-executive director. The company hopes to develop closer links with the US intelligence establishment.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I do agree with the fact that it's a step forward, and a very nice step. But the article present this as flight time that opens a lot of potential. My point was that, for a practical application, it is not all about flight time. A platform with infinite flight time, but zero payload capability is of no use.
So, as much as this a good step forward, TFA is a bit over enthusiastic regarding the "opened up" potential.
But it did come down, which means, some resource got drained... Which one? The batteries, which may have been only partially recharging during the day, is one possible explanation....
The first people to fly a solar-powered plane through the night, Tom Gage and his team at AC Propulsion, flew for 48 hours...and could have probably flown forever -- the resource that was drained was the on-ground pilots.
The plane was flown to use thermals as much as possible during the day, but it was tiring work.
Anyway, after two days, and with a battery charge higher than what they started at, they figured that they had made their point.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I think the quasi-satellite implications of this really can't be overlooked. Shooting things into space, especially into a geosynchronous orbit is really expensive. Shooting things simply into orbit is still extremely expensive AND you need to launch multiple satellites to get continuous coverage. If you could pop a few of these up at a fraction of the costs, you could get massive coverage, extremely cheaply.
For a place like the US that would be neat and useful, but where it would REALLY pay dividends would be in places like India where they have shitty infrastructure and a democratic government that can't blast peoples' houses easily to make way for new infrastructure (like they can in China). If you could toss a few of these up over India, you could cheaply (much cheaper than laying down land lines or towers) get some serious coverage even to remote places with bad roads.
As explained in the BBC article, flying over one of the poles is not necessary to fly forever. This team is now working on a defense project codenamed Vulture to extend their design to be able to fly non-stop for 5 years on any spot on the Earth's surface. Although they don't mention why Zephyr couldn't fly more than 84 hours, presumably it was either because it wasn't able to recharge its batteries fast enough during daytime, or they voluntarily stopped the experiment after 84 hours. In any case it looks like their design is not far from being able to "fly forever".
Perhaps for military use it's desirable to fly that low, but another way to get a solar plane flying forever is to get it light enough and get the sink rate low enough (1 foot/second) that it can glide all night (100000 feet -> 40000 feet) and still be in the lower stratosphere by sunrise. That way you don't need batteries, and you'll always be above the clouds and weather.
A plane designed for this will be flimsy and fly extremely slowly near ground (slower than walking speed), so it'd have to be launched and retrieved during calm weather, but once up, there would be very little to go wrong - at most latitudes it could circle in one spot indefinitely.
Anyone who writes that the Global Hawk is the size of a fighter has never seen one in person. The damn thing is HUGE. The wingspan is even greater than that of a U-2. It's an awesome plane with some serious potential.
A platform with infinite flight time, but zero payload capability is of no use..
You're probably too young to remember seeing them, but the Echo series of communications satellites were simply 100 foot diameter mylar balloons. They were passive -- they had no payload at all -- but NASA was able to bounce radio signals off of them.
A stationary "mirror in the sky" might make for a good way to bounce radio signals into and out of a hostile area without the power requirements needed for satellite communications.
Just because there is no apparent practical application doesn't mean there will never be one. I am frequently amazed at what people can do with the simplest things.
John
Solar planes are going to reduce the need for satellite and satellite launches. That may lower the cost for some services, but it will also mean that there's less interest in commercial uses of space.
Don't confuse a "feat" with a "record". Feats are what people do. Records are feats that can be proven to have happened. If an achievement is not properly documented, there's no way to know for sure whether it was done.
So it's not whether or not the feat was surpassed, it's whether the feat was surpassed in a way that can be verified. I can say to you that I've got a cure for cancer, or tell you that I can run 30 MPH barefoot, but neither claim means anything there's some verification of the process - some official body (EG: the American Medical Association in the United States) has performed testing to some standard process to verify that the cancer cure I claim actually works at least most of the time. (In medicine, almost nothing works 100% of the time, not even aspirin)
You and I have no particular doubt that they flew the time they're claiming. But if it has not passed the most widely recognized process for validating this record, the RECORD still stands, and will stand until the proper process has been followed to record the fact that the old record has been broken.
However, they have a plan, which entails aircraft like this flying for MONTHS ON END. So they probably don't much care about documenting the record, since their numbers are likely to improve dramatically over the next year or so. Why go through the effort of documenting what is, for them, a rather minor, incremental step, solely to prove a record?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There's also a lot less latency when you don't have to go the extra few miles between syn and ack packets.
lol: You see no door there!