NASA Ikhana Assists SoCal Firefighters 60
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.'"
Not as good as they make it out to be (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is a Predator at Edwards, Ikhana or not? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've started at image for two days, but where's Waldo (pepper)?
Re:Now? (Score:3, Interesting)
data delivery (Score:2, Interesting)
quote "... 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
So what did it do for the remaining 20 hours? A beer run?
Displaced SoCal citizens could have used that data, we could still use it today (Saturday).
The good news is that the data wasn't entirely restricted to emergency personnel- you and I can see some of the GISified fire data here (pdf):
http://www.sdcountyemergency.com/newsreleases/10262007_1900hrs_Evac_FirePerem.pdf [sdcountyemergency.com]
and here (Google Earth application required):
http://mw1.google.com/mw-earth-vectordb/socalfires/eoc1/root.kml [google.com]