An extra-warm , extra-crazy El Niño winter is causing havoc across the country, and particularly terrorizing the West Coast. As usual, the government’s solution to terrorism is to use a drone. Thankfully, Northrup Grumman’s RQ-4 Global Hawk isn’t liable to shoot anything other than pictures anytime soon, but NASA’s special version of the plane is taking on storms out in the Pacific Ocean, hoping to put eyes in the sky on dangerous weather before it gets too close to land. The Global Hawk is a surveillance drone, which means instead of rockets it’s mostly loaded with whatever high-tech sensing, seeing, or listening equipment the operators want it to have. The U.S. Air Force owns 33 of them, with more on the way, prizing them for their range and endurance. Slightly-less-friendly whale-shaped drone. NASA likes them for the same reasons — you can cram a bunch of sensors in them and keep them in the air for up to 24 hours at a range of 8,500-nautical-miles. For the military, that means you can keep monitoring targets for a long period of time before sending things to shoot them; for NASA, that means you can get a bird 60,000 feet in […]
