NASA's UAV helps fight California wild fires

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California credited an unmanned NASA aircraft Monday with helping save the Sierra foothills town of Paradise from a wildfire last week, calling the plane “one of the most exciting new weapons in our firefighting arsenal.” Schwarzenegger was at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, getting a behind-the-scenes look at the help the aircraft has given to crews fighting more than 1,700 blazes that have blackened 829,000 acres of California this fire season. The plane, an adaption of the Predator drone used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, can stay airborne for more than twenty hours. It uses an infrared imagery system to identify hot spots and transmit that information instantly to firefighters across the state. The infrared vision system “lets us look through the smoke and create what’s virtually an MRI of the fire,” said Steve Hipskind, chief of the earth sciences division at the research center, referring to magnetic resonance imaging. Firefighters “can make tactical decisions on the fire in near real time,” he said.

This is what happened last week when flames were nearing the Butte County town of Paradise, the governor said. Pictures from the drone, known as Ikhana for the Choctaw word for “intelligent,” revealed intense heat at the bottom of a canyon just east of the town where fire crews hadn’t expected there to be trouble. With the wind predicted to start blowing toward Paradise, firefighters quickly pulled crews and equipment out of other areas to set up a line outside the town and ordered the immediate evacuation of 10,000 residents. The drone proved itself “a superstar,” giving firefighters enough warning to save the town’s people, homes and other buildings, the governor said. The plane, which costs about $20 million with its load of high-tech equipment, spends most of its time as a NASA research vehicle, carrying atmospheric and remote sensing devices, as well as serving as a platform for flight testing. Although it is based at NASA’s Drydan Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in the desert northeast of Los Angeles, the remotely piloted aircraft’s long-range capabilities and ability to send pictures and other sensor data back to ground stations quickly provide an ideal way to get important fire information to the people who need it. “I wish I’d had this tool 20 years ago,” said Del Walter, assistant regional chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “You can only imagine the feeling of seeing a fire take off up a hill and seeing lifting embers … and you don’t know if it’s gone over the next road, over the next hill or over the next creek.”