NASA designs drone for environmental missions.

• Author: Foster, Sharon
• Position: Tech talk

NASA is developing an unmanned aerial vehicle, called Altair, for environmental science missions, such as volcanic observation, forest monitoring and atmospheric sampling.

Altair is an extended-winged version of the MQ-9 Predator B military UAV, and was built to performance specifications established by NASA's Earth Science Enterprise. The Altair is designed for civil applications that have been developed under the Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology program at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, in...