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Zephyr Solar Plane Tops 7 Days Aloft
chichilalescu writes "The UK-built Zephyr solar-powered plane has smashed the endurance record for an unmanned aerial vehicle. The craft took off from the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona at 1440 BST (0640 local time) last Friday and is still in the air. Maybe we can attach some netbooks, and extend the Internet to the clouds."
If the military will let us/them...
why is one wing shaped differently than the other, i wonder..
Interesting and quite an achievement but how useful is it in 'real life' (ie. military use) when weather conditions may not be so ideal as they presumably are in arizona? Can it handle high winds and storms or will it fall apart?
Also wont it present a fetching target for those 'unfriendlies' the military would be watching or does it fly too high?
"Maybe we can attach some netbooks, and extend the internet to the clouds."
Really? That's the best way to summarise record-breaking solar flight? A stupid, and basically illogical, pun?
The current official world endurance record for a UAV is 30 hours, 24 minutes. This was set by the US robot Global Hawk. Zephyr itself has already recorded an 83-hour continuous flight but representatives from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) were not present to witness proceedings.
However, they are at Yuma this time and so the latest flight will go down as an official world record provided the FAI is satisfied its rules have been followed.
They had better hurry up and end the light otherwise the FAI guy might give up and go home.
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Today petroleum resources are going to be end,that's why making of a plane which is solar powered. From: SEO Sydney Company.
Its project manager, Jon Saltmarsh, said Zephyr would be brought down once it had flown non-stop for a fortnight.
"Zephyr is basically the first 'eternal aircraft'," he told BBC News.
Which makes for a decent observation plane, mostly for disaster-area surveillance (dunno military apps, though). QinetiQ seems to agree:
Potential applications for Zephyr include earth observation and communications relay.
I remember reading on ./ that the Nasa Pathfinder concept is comparable to a very-low-orbit satellite for practical purposes, even advancing the possibilities in Martian exploration.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Qinetiq is the commercial r+d arm of the UK military. They don't just build stuff for the fun of it.
A) their funding requires them to be hunting down sales and profit and B) they are the commercial spin off of the military (one of their biggest clients) so they sure as heck didn't spend years putting PhD level researchers on developing a solar flying wing just because they thought it would be a cool thing to do. They'll be expecting to make a profit out of this and for starters they'll be offering the US military a preferential deal (once they've got their patents also nicely sorted to cover any competitors and given the UK military first shout on the best stuff).
The problem is that you are limited by the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth. Even with solar panel efficiency at 100% you would only have about one kilowatt/square meter.
and we can sleep soundly knowing that even if we all blast ourselves back to the stone-age, our enemy's cave-man descendants won't have it easy.
5... 4... 3... 2... 1...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Loitering aircraft like this can have a lot of uses. A close cousin of my wife did a great deal of his graduate work on the use of unmanned aircraft for the purpose of fire spotting. The idea was to keep a small fleet of cheap, low maintenance, long-life aircraft over areas that experienced frequent forest fires in the summer months. The quicker you spot the blaze, the easier it is to fix, and a few cheap UAVs outfitted with sensors (the version they were working on actually didn't require any human interaction) is a lot cheaper and potentially more effective than manning ranger stations.
What if a plane like this could be used for routing internet or cell phone traffic?
Because these planes can stay up indefinitely and can fly over specific locations they offer an interesting way to "break" the monopolies posed by the Telephone and Cable companies over most of U.S. and presumably much of the rest of the world. The major problem with satellites is the ground-to-satellite distances and the delays that imposes on "real-world" applications such as telephone conversations or internet access. Low altitude (13-18km [42,000-60,000] ft) is above that at which most jet airplanes fly. Yet one could position planes such as this slightly to the north of most major metropolitan regions and use them effectively as relay towers which would require less infrastructure than standard "cell" phone towers without the delays associated with standard geosynchronous satellites. The planes could be flown continuously out of "regional" airports which have high bandwidth connections to the Internet backbone and provide the high bandwidth up/down-link services to the plane-towers. Interestingly because the plane-towers could be positioned north of most cities one could have mini-dish/phased-array antennas attached to homes, cars, etc. to provide the connection capabilities using the same frequencies currently used for satellite communications (where the dishes face south) [1].
It looks to me like this is an opportunity waiting to be implemented. The cost of the planes is likely to decrease as more nano-technologies become available (e.g. nanotube based wings, lightweight high efficiency solar cells) and electronics advances make routers smaller and more efficient). A JV between Google & Cisco could bring down the monopolies and make the Internet World cheaper for all of us.
1. I'm obviously talking about the northern hemisphere here.
Heinlein wrote about stratospheric relay aircraft even before Clarke wrote about geosync relay sats.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA