September 9, 2012

Image Credit: NASA/Tony Landis

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

NASA has launched the part of its Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) mission designed to study hurricanes in the field this week with the programs first flight of an unmanned Global Hawk aircraft over Hurricane Leslie in the Atlantic Ocean.

The research drone took off from NASAs Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California Thursday and landed at the federal agencys Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va., on Friday after spending 10 hours in the air collecting data on the Category 1 storm.

Last weeks flight is the first of two scheduled flights for the program this month. The first Global Hawk carried a payload of instruments dedicated to measuring the environment during the storm.

The primary objective of the environmental Global Hawk is to describe the interaction of tropical disturbances and cyclones with the hot, dry, and dusty air that moves westward off the Saharan desert and appears to affect the ability of storms to form and intensify, said HS3 mission principal investigator Scott Braun in a NASA statement.

As the plane approached and flew over the storm, it measured cloud structure, temperature, water vapor vertical profile, cloud properties, and particulate matter such as dust and sea salt. Once the craft was over the storm, it ejected small sensors parachuted down through the storm to record winds, temperature and humidity.

A second Global Hawk that takes flight in two weeks will focus on flying over a developing or established storm and looking and the internal mechanics that make it tick by measuring eyewall and rain-band winds and precipitation using Doppler radar.

Instruments on the over-storm Global Hawk will examine the role of deep thunderstorm systems in hurricane intensity change, particularly to detect changes in low-level wind fields in the vicinity of these thunderstorms, said Braun.

Follow this link:

NASA Flies Global Hawk Over Hurricane Leslie