NASA finally decided that Global Hawk will conduct its first earth science mission in June. On Thursday, 15 Jan 2009 NASA and Northrop Grumman unveiled two global hawks at Edward Air Force Base, California. Global Hawk is a version of Air Force’s top-of-the-line unmanned spy plane with a wingspan of 116 feet (35.36 meters). It can fly up to 65,000 feet (19,800 meters) and can carry up to 20,000 pounds (907 kg) payloads. It is capable of staying aloft for more than 30 hours and will sample greenhouse gases responsible for ozone depletion and verify measurements by NASA’s aura atmosphere research satellite.
Previous aircrafts used for atmospheric research purposes were smaller and were not capable of staying as long as Global Hawk. In 2007 NASA received two Global Hawks from the Air Force. Last year Global Hawk maker Northrop Grumman received a 5-year contract of up to $25 millions to support NASA’s Gobal Hawk unmanned aircraft program for atmospheric research. NASA and Northrup Grumman will both use these Global Hawks, NASA for earth science research mission and Northrup Grumman for its marketing and other aerospace business concerns.
“Global Hawk Pacific 2009” is a program for the first use of Global Hawk by NASA for its Earth science mission. According to this program one of the aircrafts outfitted with scientific instruments will fly out of Edward Air Force Base of Los Angeles and return there after its initial flight of several hours eventually ramp up to 30 hours. The targets of these flights will be over the Pacific and the Arctic. During Global Hawk flights scientists will have access to their instruments through dedicated satellite feed and view data in realtime.
Global Hawk aircraft used for NASA are two of seven aircrafts built for the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The total developmental cost of each unmanned vehicle is approximately $132.2. The two new NASA aircraft are the first and sixth aircraft to be built in the seven-aircraft group. The Global Hawk aircraft contains Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which is a high resolution system that is able to see through cloud cover, sandstorms, and other such severe atmospheric conditions. It also contains Electro-Optical/Infrared (EO/IR) imagery, which provides up to 40,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers) of surface area per day.
Talking about the Global Hawk, Paul A. Newman, the project Scientist of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said, “It’s a whole new ballgame for us”. While Michael Freilich, director of the NASA Earth Science Division, stated, “The Global Hawks will provide superb new measurement possibilities for our climate science and applications programs.”
