Aviation in the polar regions of our temperate world is a chancy thing. There are no airstrips if something goes wrong, and the weather is often poor, making a successful flight as much a matter of luck as a matter of planning. Keeping crews available to take advantage of breaks in such bad weather is difficult in the best of times, and in the modern budget-crunched circumstances polar aviation for ice sheet research has all but stalled out.Now the engineers at the University of Kansas in Lawrence are out to change that! They have been working for a number of years to design an aircraft called Meridian which can be operated totally autonomously (i.e. an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV) and can handle both arctic and antarctic conditions far better than the average human flier (for example, flying at exactly 1000 feet above the ground for hours regardless of the outside temperature). Also, if the plane is forced down, no expensive and often futile rescue effort will be required.
The plane itself is fitted with a specialized ground penetrating radar
(warning: PDF link) that will allow accurate mapping of the interface between the ground and the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. This will provide essential data to update our models on how fast the ice of the polar regions will slip into the sea, potentially endangering billions of citizens in the world's shoreline cities.If the technology demonstrator works as planned and NASA comes through with the additional five years of funding, look for a small fleet of these vehicles to soon be humming through the chilly skies of the polar zones.
Talos has suggested they wear warm sweaters, just in case.
(Images courtesy of The University of Kansas at Lawrence CReSIS and the MIT Technology Review.)
