NASA870

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center plans to fly the first operational mission of its Ikhana unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) next week, mapping wildfires in the western U.S. using an infrared scanner built by Ames Research Center.

The team plans a checkout flight on or around Aug. 4, then its first 24-hour fire mission Aug. 9, flying at 23,000 feet over as many as a dozen of the many fires that rage on in the western states at any given time during the fire season.

Dryden took delivery of the modified U.S. Air Force Predator B from manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in late June. Its name is a Choctaw Nation word for "conscious" or "aware." Training is nearly finished for the second of two NASA pilots who will operate Ikhana, according to Brent Cobleigh, Dryden's Ikhana project manager.

Training began in January but had to stand down in March for two months while engineers dealt with an interference problem between the UAV's inertial navigation system (INS) and its Global Positioning System (GPS) antenna. Although the Honeywell-built INS/GPS system is common to all Predators, the interference issue is unique to the Ikhana's configuration, according to Cobleigh. Training resumed in May.

The wildfire flights are a follow-on to flights conducted last year using General Atomics' Altair (DAILY, Nov. 2, 2006).

Last year, negotiations with FAA over the certificate of authorization (COA) required for the flights dragged on longer than expected, causing the team to miss most of the fire season. "In the end, we really didn't meet all the objectives we wanted to do last year," Cobleigh says. This year the team spent months in advance working with FAA on a COA covering a "huge area" of the western states that is receiving final signatures now.

Onboard the aircraft, infrared images of the fires will be sent to Ames and integrated with a Google Earth tool. The resulting product will overlay fire images from Ikhana, weather data, and fire data from satellites onto a single image that will go to fire commanders at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. The resulting "strategic tool" will help commanders decide how they want to deploy their resources, according to Cobleigh.

Apart from the fire mission, the Ikhana team is looking forward to an aeronautics experiment in which the UAV will demonstrate a wing-shape sensing system. The system will pass light through hair-like fiberoptics glued or embedded into Ikhana's flexible wings, measuring strain and calculating in real time the wing's shape.

The team also is eyeing flights of prototype scientific sensors, including an advanced Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensor and a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for UAVs that is flying on a piloted aircraft for the moment but should be ready for Ikhana within the next couple of years.