Ultimate Mashup: NASA's Predator UAV and Google Earth Join Forces to Fight Fires in California

NASA's Ikhana UAV hard at work over the Lake Arrowhead blaze, with a thermal imaging pod under the wing.
(NASA Photo by Jim Ross)

Telstar Logistics has written quite a bit about Tanker 910, the DC-10 water bomber that has become an essential firefighting tool in California this week. But Tanker 910 isn't the only advanced aircraft helping to battle the blaze; to generate the advanced data firefighters need to identify critical fire hotspots, NASA has also been flying a version of the General Atomics Predator B unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the smoke-filled skies above Southern California.

Called the Ikhana, NASA's UAV is used as a testbed both for airborne ground-survey technologies and for the air traffic control systems needed to fly unmanned vehicles in civilian airspace. Ikhana (the name is a Choctaw word meaning intelligence, consciousness, or awareness) has been busy this week, carrying thermal-infrared imaging equipment that can peer through all the wildfire smoke to precisely track the movement of the flames around San Diego. As Defense Industry Daily reports today:

Each [Ikhana] flight is being coordinated with the US FAA to allow the remotely piloted aircraft to fly within the national airspace while maintaining separation from other aircraft. The imagery is processed on board, downlinked, and overlaid on Google Earth maps at NASA Ames Research Center [at Moffett Field] in Northern California, Then it's made available by the National Interagency Fire Center to incident commanders in the field to aid them in allocating their fire-fighting resources. The mission was controlled by pilots remotely from a ground control station at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base.

Google Earth!  Talk about the killer mashup!

This NASA photo shows the Ikhana ground crew loading the thermal imaging scanner pallet onto the drone as the UAV was prepared to join the fire-fighting effort:

When all is said and done, what do the fire incident commanders see? Here's an image taken by Ikhana over the Lake Arrowhead fire on October 24/25:

NASA explains: "The colorized image is a mosaic of images draped over the terrain and shown in 3D. The active wildfire fronts are in yellow and red, while hot, previously burned areas are in shades of dark red and purple. Unburned areas are shown in green hues."

Telstar Logistics has been harsh in our criticism of US Forest Service bureaucrats whose red tape kept innovative tools like the Evergreen 747 Supertanker on the sidelines as SoCal burned.  But we're also happy to report that Ikhana is an example of the feds at their innovative best, with NASA, the FAA, and the Forest Service working together to make sure the fire-fighters on the ground have the information they need to get the job done. Nice work!

LINKS:
NASA Aircraft Aiding Southern California Firefighting Effort (NASA Press Release)

NASA MQ-9 Imaging California Wildfires (Defense Industry Daily)

MQ-1 Predator (Wikipedia entry)

NASA's Ikhana Photo Gallery

PREVIOUSLY:
DC-10 Fire Tanker Joins the Fight Against SoCal Blazes; Supertanker 747 Remains Unemployed

Hovercraft Save California Island from Raging Wildfire

Larry and Sergey Cleared to Land at Uncle Sam's Private Airport in Silicon Valley

(All photos above by NASA)

Comments

[Stuart]

NASA using Google Earth? Does this mean that they're abandoning World Wind? Maybe it was part of the Moffett field deal NASA did with Larry and Sergei.

[John]

Looks like some of the amazing 3D ski maps dale produces.

Also interesting are this video on the Fugro Chance's LIDAR system for mapping 3d images of both land and subseas terrain:
http://www.fugro-pelagos.com/lidar/Fugro_LIDAR_med.wmv