NASA CENTER SET FOR EAFB AGENCY PLANS TO PROMOTE ITS UNMANNED AIR VEHICLES.

Byline: Jim Skeen Staff Writer

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE - Seeking to put technologies developed at Edwards Air Force Base into real world use, NASA is creating an unmanned air vehicle center to promote the abilities of such aircraft for science and commercial missions.

NASA officials want to promote the use of unmanned air vehicles, or UAVs, equipped with high-resolution digital imaging systems to perform missions that would be impractical or too dangerous for manned aircraft.

UAVs could serve as low-cost, low-level substitutes for space satellites, NASA says.

``The principal goal is to have the members of the partnership begin developing the marketing plan, if you will, to seek other interested parties in using UAVs,'' said Rich Christiansen, associate director of planning at Dryden.

NASA is creating the UAV Applications Center, a partnership involving the agency's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards and its Ames Research Center at Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The partnership also includes Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., and the Girvan Institute, a nonprofit organization working with NASA to create a research and development campus at Moffett Field, a former Navy airfield in Mountain View.

Clark University is about to embark on what is being billed as the first commercial use of a solar-powered UAV - the study of coffee fields in Hawaii using a flying wing tested at Dryden.

Images will be sent from the aircraft to computers on the ground to allow coffee growers to see which parts of a plantation are ready for harvesting.

NASA officials say the project has implications for other uses, such as fighting forest fires and assisting with civil emergencies.

Efforts of the center will include developing procedures for operating UAVs in Federal Aviation Administration-controlled airspace; testing and evaluating high-resolution imaging systems; testing real-time telemetry systems for payload control and data transfer; integrating imaging payloads onto UAVs; and implementing educational research opportunities for university students.

``We are confident that the UAV Applications Center will serve as a useful model for efficient and responsible technology transfer,'' said John Bassett, president of Clark University.

Christiansen said the UAV Applications Center is an offshoot of Dryden's Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology, or ERAST, program. ERAST was started by NASA in 1994 to develop UAV technologies and the miniaturization of science instruments.

The purpose of ERAST is to enable aircraft companies to build UAVs that can carry out science missions that would be either impractical or impossible for NASA's current fleet of science platform aircraft.

For example, UAVs could fly through the plume of a volcano or very high over the North and South poles. Or they could fly for months at a time collecting science data that varies with the position of the sun or the season of the year.

Among the aircraft developed under ERAST that will be of interest to the UAV Applications Center include an aircraft known as the Helios prototype, which set a record for solar-powered aircraft when it reached an altitude of 96,863 feet last August.

A series of research flights in 2003 are expected to validate a fuel-cell system designed to permit the Helios prototype to fly long-duration missions. The goal is develop an aircraft capable of flying missions lasting weeks or even months.

Another aircraft of interest is the Altair, an aircraft being developed by General Atomics. The aircraft, a derivative of the Predator reconnaissance planes in use in Afghanistan, is expected to be able to conduct missions at altitudes of 52,000 feet.

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NASA is building an unmanned air vehicle applications center at Edwards Air Force Base to promote its pilotless aircraft -like this Helios prototype - for scientific and commercial uses.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration