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Hi! My name is Dr. Emily Schaller,
and I'm here at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility
on the eastern shore of Virginia.
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We're here because NASA is
using airplanes to study hurricanes.
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The mission is called HS3,
which stands for the Hurricane and
Severe Storm Sentinel.
What's a Severe Storm Sentinel?
It's actually a remotely controlled
airplane called the Global Hawk
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV.
Pilots fly the plane from a cockpit on the ground.
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NASA is using these Global Hawks
to study hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean,
by flying over and around them.
The Global Hawk can fly for
very long periods of time, at very high altitudes.
It can fly almost twice as high as a
commercial jet. And it can fly for over 24 hours,
without stopping.
That's why scientists are using the Global Hawk
for the HS3 mission, so they can continuously
study storms as they develop.
Forecasters have a pretty good idea of
where these storms go.
But what they want to know is, will they grow?
We spoke with NASA mission scientists about
how the Global Hawk will help improve their
understanding of hurricane formation and growth,
and why it's so important for us
to learn more about hurricanes.
Dr. Scott Braun: The Hurricane and Severe Storm
Sentinel has a goal to try to better understand the
processes that control the intensity of storms.
The ability to predict the intensity
is very important because it impacts
people in the coastal zones who, if they're
anticipating, say, a tropical storm,
a Category 1 storm and they end up getting
a Category 3 storm, it makes a big difference
in terms of their ability to prepare and
deal with the storm consequences.
Dr. Paul Newman: And this is really important
because a category of a hurricane
is the intensity of the winds
associated with a hurricane.
So a Category 5 hurricane is much more
destructive than a Category 1.
So being able to predict the difference
between just a tropical storm, a Category 1
up to a Category 5, is really, really crucial
to saving lives and lessening damage
and so forth. Particularly saving lives.
Janel Thomas: The benefit of HS3 compared to
any other hurricane mission is the fact that
we have these planes able to fly
upwards of 24 hours.
And being able to monitor a storm for that long
period of time and getting constant data,
we can actually catch changes in the storm.
Dr. Paul Newman: We will use two Global Hawks.
One Global Hawk flies over vast areas
around a hurricane. It measures
the environment that a
hurricane is embedded in.
And then the second Global Hawk,
instead of sampling the vast area,
it goes right in to look at the eye
and the eye wall and the
inner core processes of a hurricane.
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Dr. Emily Schaller: The Global Hawk Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles flown by NASA
were originally built for the military
and used for flight testing at
Edwards Air Force Base in California.
When the Air Force was done testing these
models, they were transferred to NASA,
which turned the planes into
airborne laboratories to study the Earth.
NASA flew its first science mission
with the Global Hawk in 2010.
Dr. Scott Braun: The Global Hawks are really a
new aircraft for doing hurricane studies.
Manned aircraft typically fly for say, 8 to 10 hours
when they do a research flight. Of that 8 to 10
hours you may have 4 hours or more
just getting to and from the storm.
So that in a typical flight you only get
4 to 6 hours actually sampling within the storm.
With the Global Hawk, we can get three times,
sometimes even four times as much
as you can get with manned aircraft.
Dr. Paul Newman: Now this plane can fly
to 65,000 feet. It can fly 13 miles up.
It can also fly for nearly 30 hours.
So this plane can take off here, from Virginia,
on the coastline of Virginia,
close to where hurricanes form.
It can fly all the way to Africa.
It can spend about 10 hours on the
coastline of Africa and then fly all the way back.
There's no plane that can do that
in the NASA vehicles that we have.
Dr. Emily Schaller: Because the Global Hawk
can so high for so long,
scientists can study larger areas of the Earth
for longer periods of time,
in places where planes with pilots onboard
may not be able to reach.
We spoke with pilot Phil Hall
about the Global Hawk and what it's like
to fly the plane without actually being inside it.
Commander Phil Hall: So the two Global Hawks
that we're flying for HS3,
Air Vehicle 6 and Air Vehicle 1,
from a pilot perspective
it's a very different aircraft.
We don't have any rudder pedals
or a control yoke.
We actually use a mouse and keyboard.
We actually have a control room on the ground.
We have two of them now.
We have one at Edwards Air Force Base
in California, and we have one here
at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
So it's basically like a trailer.
It's been specially designed for Global Hawk.
It's full of computer systems
that can talk to the aircraft.
So we can connect to the Internet.
And all these satellite products of lightning,
the storm from satellite images,
we're able to download that almost real time
and use that to actually navigate the storm.
For the first part of the mission,
we actually fly the aircraft from Wallops.
And once we get about two or three hours
into our flight, we actually transfer control
of the airplane back to Edwards Air Force Base,
NASA Dryden Flight Research Center.
It's very different from any kind of,
any other kind of aviation operation
in that we have pilots on both coasts
and we can actually transfer control
of the aircraft during the flight to the other pilots.
And when you have these long missions
like 26 or 27 hours, one person can't sit there
for the entire flight. So we actually have three
or four shifts of people that come and go
to man this aircraft.
Dr. Paul Newman: Now, pilots know how to fly
planes and they can tell the plane where to go.
But how does a pilot actually know where to go?
You have to have scientific information.
Now the scientists sit in a separate trailer.
We have computers sitting in front of us.
We bring in satellite information;
we bring in forecast information.
And because weather can change so fast,
they can collect that information, interpret it,
and then relay it to the pilots and say,
well instead of going over to this point,
why don't you go over to this point over here,
which is where we think
the eye has relocated.
So it's a great team between the scientists
and the pilots to actually get
the most information you can out of a flight.
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Dr. Emily Schaller: How can you become
involved in our mission?
You can follow the plane, too,
just like the pilots and scientists do,
by participating in live chats,
or you can get live updates
on where the plane is flying
right from your own classroom.
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Janel Thomas: You can definitely be a part
of our mission
by actually being able to look
at the same screen we're looking at.
I'm looking at where the plane is flying
with respect to the storm.
And you have access to the same data
I get to look at.
You have access to see the plane's altitude,
you can see the wind speeds,
you can see the wind direction.
And you can chat live with the pilots,
with forecasters, mission scientists,
and we're looking at the same thing you are
and that's just really exciting to know that
you can ask us any question at any time
and we are right there
looking at the same thing.
Dr. Emily Schaller: To learn more
about our mission, visit nasa.gov/hs3.
See you next time on NASA Airborne.
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