Hurricane Hunters

Drone inside a storm

Image Credit: NASA, via CC

Most of you must have heard about storm chasers but can someone actually hunt the storm and track then while they are building up. Well, there are drones made by NASA that follow the hurricanes. There has been a lot of opposition on the usage of drones to kill the enemies, but this seems like a good use of them.

What are drones? A drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which is actually an aircraft without a human pilot onboard. Its flight is controlled  by computers inside the drone or via the remote control.

As a part of NASA’s  Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) program, Global Hawk unmanned aircraft was sent out over this past weekend to measure the intensity of  the Tropical Storm Frank in the eastern Pacific Ocean.  This flight was a first of its kind. NASA has developed two Global Hawk UAVs which can fly higher than 55,000 feet and stay in the air for 30 hours.

However, only one aircraft can be airborne at a time because it takes a lot of engineers to maintain it.

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