Security

Defense Firm's Global Warming Solution: More Drones

Executives at defense behemoth Northrop Grumman are worried about climate change. The solution? Build a "global change monitoring system" — and buy more Global Hawk surveillance drones. In a speech yesterday at an aerospace symposium in Maryland, Robert Burke, vice president of Civil Systems for Northrop Grumman’s Aerospace Systems sector, noted that the younger generation, […]

Global_hawk

Executives at defense behemoth Northrop Grumman are worried about climate change. The solution? Build a "global change monitoring system" -- and buy more Global Hawk surveillance drones.

In a speech yesterday at an aerospace symposium in Maryland, Robert Burke, vice president of Civil Systems for Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector, noted that the younger generation, with their "blogs" and their "twitters," are already aware of melting polar ice caps and the latest in solar technology. Now it's time for the grownups to get on board.

"As the rate of global change accelerates and budgets are squeezed, we in industry and government must change our perspective," he said. "The mind-set that makes us stick with what we know, our comfort zone, cannot last. We must strive to develop innovative concepts for Earth sensing – utilizing new platform opportunities and new instrument architectures and technology."

Specifically, Burke called for using more pilotless aircraft in Earth observation missions. The latest unmanned aerial vehicles, he argued, can offer wider coverage than geosynchronous or polar-orbiting satellites, and they can be customized to carry payloads that monitor climate change, collect atmospheric data or perform disaster assessment after storms:

At Northrop Grumman, we’re already thinking along these lines. We build the Global Hawk Unmanned Aircraft System, which can fly at altitudes of 65,000 feet for more than 30 hours at a time. Global Hawks traditionally carry out military missions and are currently providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to our troops in Afghanistan. But we recently partnered with NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center and NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] for the Hawk’s initial Earth science mission.

Burke was referring here to Global Hawk Pacific 2009 (GloPac), a series of long-duration flights over the Pacific and Arctic regions that are planned for the late spring and early summer. Among other things, the flights will measure dust, smoke, and pollution as it crosses the Pacific from Asia and Siberia, and sample polar stratospheric air.

Defense-speak aside, using drones for these kinds of missions is not that far-out of an idea. As we've noted here previously, NASA has used drones to spot wildfires in California; Global Hawks have been employed in hurricane relief missions on the Gulf Coast. But GloPac is the first dedicated science mission for the high-flying drone.

So can we expect more defense companies to offer up more solutions to fight global warming? After all, as Burke noted, "global monitoring is a systems challenge."

No, no, no, Mr. Burke: You mean system-of-systems challenge.

[PHOTO: U.S. Air Force]

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