Physics, Math, & Memes, Mostly

From advanced wing designs, through the hypersonic frontier, and onward into the era of composite structures, electronic flight controls, and energy efficient flight, our engineers and researchers have led the way in virtually every aeronautic development. And since 2011, aeronautical innovators from around the country have been working on our Unmanned Aircraft Systems integration in the National Airspace System, or UAS in the NAS, project.  

This project was a new type of undertaking that worked to identify, develop, and test the technologies and procedures that will make it possible for unmanned aircraft systems to have routine access to airspace occupied by human piloted aircraft. Since the start, the goal of this unified team was to provide vital research findings through simulations and flight tests to support the development and validation of detect and avoid and command and control technologies necessary for integrating UAS into the NAS.  

That interest moved into full-scale testing and evaluation to determine how to best integrate unmanned vehicles into the national airspace and how to come up with standards moving forward. Normally, 44,000 flights safely take off and land here in the U.S., totaling more than 16 million flights per year. With the inclusion of millions of new types of unmanned aircraft, this integration needs to be seamless in order to keep the flying public safe.

Working hand-in-hand, teams collaborated to better understand how these UAS’s would travel in the national airspace by using NASA-developed software in combination with flight tests. Much of this work is centered squarely on technology called detect and avoid.  One of the primary safety concerns with these new systems is the inability of remote operators to see and avoid other aircraft.  Because unmanned aircraft literally do not have a pilot on board, we have developed concepts allowing safe operation within the national airspace.  

In order to better understand how all the systems work together, our team flew a series of tests to gather data to inform the development of minimum operational performance standards for detect and avoid alerting guidance. Over the course of this testing, we gathered an enormous amount of data allowing safe integration for unmanned aircraft into the national airspace. As unmanned aircraft are becoming more ubiquitous in our world - safety, reliability, and proven research must coexist.

Every day new use case scenarios and research opportunities arise based around the hard work accomplished by this incredible workforce. Only time will tell how these new technologies and innovations will shape our world.

Want to learn the many ways that NASA is with you when you fly? Visit nasa.gov/aeronautics.



Earth’s atmosphere: new results from the International Space Station

With ESA’s help, the latest atmosphere monitor on the International Space Station is delivering results on our planet’s ozone, aerosol and nitrogen trioxide levels. Installed last year on the orbital outpost, NASA’s sensor tracks the Sun and Moon to probe the constituents of our atmosphere.

The Station takes only 90 minutes for a complete circuit of our planet, experiencing 16 sunrises, 16 sunsets, and sometimes moonrises or moonsets, every day. By observing the Sun or Moon through the atmosphere, the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment – SAGE – measures the quantity of ozone, aerosols and other gases.

The readings are complementing the long-term monitoring by Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel missions: launched last October, Sentinel-5P is the first in a series of Sentinels focusing on the atmosphere.

As the Station orbits, SAGE is continuously turned to point in the right direction by ESA’s six-legged Hexapod.

Using position information from the Station, Hexapod’s computer calculates the movements of its six legs to track the Sun and Moon in the few seconds of their setting and rising. This will happen dozens of times each day over years.

SAGE was installed in February last year and the first results are now being released to the public. The results will be issued monthly, with the quality improving as more measurements are added.

“The installation and setting up could not have gone better and we are happy to see Hexapod working perfectly to keep SAGE pointing in the right direction,” said ESA’s Hexapod project manager Scott Hovland.

“The Hexapod and SAGE collaboration is an exemplary transatlantic cooperation and we are very happy to see the first results coming in.”

ESA has a history of tracking the Sun from the Space Station: working for more than nine years, its SOLAR facility created the most precise reference on the Sun’s energy output ever.

The next ESA sensor to be launched to the Station is the Atmospheric Space Interactions Monitor, which will point straight down at Earth to investigate high-altitude electrical storms.