Working with Nasa on environmental monitoring tech
It’s not a bird, or plane, in fact it’s invisible to the naked eye, but it could be the answer to monitoring coastal waters in New Zealand - and Nasa is lending a hand.
Kea Atmos Mk1, created by the team at Christchurch’s Kea Aerospace, has a wingspan of 12.5m, and is designed to transmit data from the stratosphere to a ground station where it can be processed and analysed.
The solar powered unit will sit “in the sweet spot” between aircraft and satellite, Kea Aerospace chief executive Mark Rocket says, capable of flying “indefinitely” using “the power of the sun to fix some of the problems we’re seeing on planet earth right now”.
“We’re very interested in applications around environmental monitoring, commercial applications ... forestry, maritime domain awareness, and disaster response. We can give people the data they’re not getting at the moment because of the limitations of current platforms.”
The team’s current project, focused on coastal water monitoring, has led Kea Aerospace to collaborate with several organisations including America’s Nasa.
The New Zealand Government made funding available for a few projects with Nasa, and as a collaboration, Kea Aerospace has been awarded money for a feasibility study along with other organisations in New Zealand including Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre.
“Hopefully that will lead on to a larger, more substantive project,” Rocket said.
Kea Aerospace is working with Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory team in Los Angeles and the Nasa Ames Research Center near San Francisco that will assist with specialist image processing and algorithm development.
Rocket said he was “really thrilled we can work with Nasa teams ... which is of extreme importance to New Zealand and other countries”.
The data collected from the stratosphere aircraft would give a “much clearer understanding of what we’re doing on land and how it affects our coastal environment and waterways”, he said.
“Land use will tend to have an impact on waterways, and what gets carried down through rivers ends up in the ocean. Large sediment loads from some forestry activity, that ends up in the ocean … which blocks sunlight which can affect marine life.”
The Kea Atmos aircraft had been in development for a couple of years and had done about 11 test flights, Rocket said.
“We’re working towards flying that ... into the stratosphere early the coming summer”.
The aim would be to have a dozen aircraft in New Zealand continually monitoring the environment and maritime domain awareness, while fleets of the aircraft would be in other countries adopting the technology, he said.
“Every year we’re getting another step closer towards fulfilling that dream of operating a global fleet of stratospheric aircraft powered by the sun.
“The Kea Aerospace team are very motivated to help solve some of the environmental issues we’re presented with at the moment. We see environmental monitoring and some of these projects, such as the coastal monitoring with Nasa ... as being really important and aligned with the goals we have as a company for the future.”