Each year, thousands of wildfires release large amounts of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, burning roughly 1.5 million acres of forests and grasslands across the country, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Suppression of these fires is a complex and costly operation with suppression costs averaging $2.9 billion over a five-year period. Managing and responding to these fires also requires cooperation between firefighters and ground personnel and the coordination of dozens of aircraft operated by multiple government agencies.
NASA’s Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations (ACERO) project led by the agency’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California uses drones and advanced aviation technology to improve wildfire coordination and operations.
Current aerial firefighting operations are limited to when aircraft have clear visibility otherwise pilots risk flying into terrain or colliding with other aircraft. This means that aircraft are grounded at night and during periods of heavy smoke.
Drones can help expand the window of time available for aerial suppression because they can be safely controlled by pilots on the ground. The use of drones for aerial suppression would reduce safety risks for pilots and streamline aerial firefighting operations.
Although drones and other aerial technologies have advanced rapidly over the past decade, emergency responders have been slow to adopt them. One of the significant barriers still holding back this adoption is the lack of tools and situational awareness for first responders to see where firefighting drones are operating.
Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations
To solve this problem, ACERO is developing airspace management technologies to share information between manned aircraft, drone operators and ground crew during wildfire responses. These technologies will provide all first responders with common situational awareness and ensure that there are no conflicts with aircraft operations.
Aircraft safety software developed by ACERO will also reduce the likelihood of you encountering hazards in the air. ACERO’s advances in aerial communication and information sharing tools and concepts will improve airspace management during wildland fires and provide response crews with more timely information to support decision-making during emergency response.
These improvements are critical to enabling new aerial wildfire response drone missions, such as fire suppression, delivering equipment to ground crews and providing communications relays in areas with limited connectivity.
Drones could also be used for prescribed burns, or fires set and controlled by experts designed to burn dead brush that acts as fuel and can lead to large-scale wildland fires.
ACERO is working with other government agencies, the scientific community, and commercial industry to develop a concept of operations for the future of wildland fire management. The project team leads an interagency task force to assess and identify concepts and technologies needed to address future challenges. ACERO will work with other government agencies to help integrate these technologies into wildland fire operations.
In the coming years, NASA will partner with industry and fire response agencies to conduct joint field demonstrations of newly developed aerospace technologies under the leadership of ACERO. These demonstrations will highlight developments from the agency’s Space Research Mission Directorate, Science Mission Directorate and Space Technology Mission Directorate.
ACERO builds on previous NASA Aeronautics research, including the Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations project and the Unmanned Aircraft Traffic Management project. ACERO’s advances in aviation for wildland fire operations support NASA’s contributions to the U.S. goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions from aviation by 2050.
Written by: Vaishali Verma
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