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Flying at 150-200 knots, the aircraft is able to cover over

4,000 miles during flight operations. The

Ikhana

was first

put into service for NASA in January 2007, and flew its

first science missions in support of wildfire observations

in August 2007. The platform is intended for aeronautics

and earth science research within the US Government.

The

Ikhana

is ideally suited to support long-

endurance/duration missions, such as those found in a

major disaster scenario, where critical observation time

over the event is required. Special coordination with the

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was required to

safely operate the

Ikhana

UAV in the National Airspace

(NAS).

AMS-Wildfire sensor

The AMS-Wildfire airborne sensor was developed at

NASA to serve the fire research and applications

community. The sensor is a twelve-spectral-channel

instrument (visible through thermal-infrared), capable

of high-altitude, autonomous operations on a multitude

of airborne platforms. Two critical channels in the

thermal-infrared allow discrete, high-temperature

discrimination of fire properties, and were used to derive

the critical fire front locations for the fires in southern

California. An automated fire-detection threshold

temperature processing model was also developed. The

temperature threshold model produces an additional file

set from the sensor that displays the active hotspots, in

addition to the thermal imagery. All the data processing

was done autonomously, on-board the UAV. This

processing included both geo- and terrain-rectification,

and development of GEOTIFF files from various spec-

tral band combinations, determined by the fire

personnel on the ground.

tools and capabilities for gathering, distributing and analysing real-

time wildfire information.

NASA capabilities and science teams respond

NASA responded to the request for federal aid by making available

both satellite and airborne sensor data to assist in the fire obser-

vations and management operations conducted by the Incident

Command Centers (ICC) and the county-level Emergency

Operations Centers (EOC). Concurrent with the southern

California fires, NASA and the USFS were collaborating on a project

focused on improving various wildfire observation and manage-

ment capabilities, using NASA-derived technologies. Those

capabilities and technologies included using unmanned airborne

vehicles (UAVs) as observation platforms, improving the thermal

sensing capabilities of instruments on those platforms, providing

real-time derived data and products from those sensors, and

demonstrating an easy-to-use data ‘collaborative environment’ and

visualization tool to effect improved fire management by teams on

the ground.

When the southern California wildfires struck, the two federal

agencies (NASA and USFS) responded with all their available

resources, including the provision of various satellite imagery and

the use of the NASA

Ikhana

UAV platform with the Autonomous

Modular Scanner – Wildfire instrument on-board. All the derived

data, imagery and products were delivered via a common visualiza-

tion Collaborative Decision Environment (CDE), based on

GoogleEarth

visualization software. The fire ICCs and the EOCs

received and used all of the data through operations of the CDE

during the NASA airborne support missions.

NASA UAV

The NASA

Ikhana

UAV is a modified General Atomics Predator-B

aircraft, designed specifically for supporting NASA science missions.

The platform is capable of 24-hour duration, and 50,000 feet altitude.

MODIS satellite images of southern California wildfires

Two NASA MODIS satellite images from 21 October 2007 show how quickly the fires spread. The right image was taken just three hours

and 15 minutes after the left image

Source: NASA MODIS