Global Hawk

Ready for its closeup: The first demilitarized Global Hawk debuts in 2009 at NASA’s Dryden center in California, where scientists will use it to study hurricanes, pollution, and other atmospheric disturbances.

"That's Professor Global Hawk" | Flight Today | Air & Space Magazine

On an April morning last year beneath a bright desert sky, officials at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California unveiled their newest tool for studying the atmosphere: a Global Hawk. In fact, it was the very first Global Hawk, produced in 1998 as a demonstrator to show the capabilities of the unmanned military airplane.

Originally developed to provide field commanders with high-resolution surveillance imagery and produced by Northrop Grumman, Global Hawks fly high and long. They reach altitudes of 65,000 feet, and can surpass 30 hours and 11,000 nautical miles in a single flight.

For Earth scientists, loading a Global Hawk up with sampling gear and sending it into the stratosphere suggests intriguing applications: measuring levels of pollutants and greenhouse gases like ozone; studying the formation of hurricanes and the shrinkage of ice sheets; monitoring the effects of natural disasters.

“Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Air Force have proved that you can use this plane to do reconnaissance,” says NASA atmospheric scientist Paul Newman, who helped oversee Global Hawk’s first climate research mission. “Well, science is just a different kind of reconnaissance.”

The Global Hawk is no diminutive drone—its slender wings span 116 feet, and its V-tail reaches 15 feet high. With its white paint job, snub nose, humped radome, and single Rolls-Royce AE-3007H turbofan engine, the Global Hawk cuts a figure both elegant and strange; its profile gives the vague impression of a beluga wearing a jetpack.

Global Hawks are well established as military aircraft: The Air Force has deployed them since 2001; 30 have been built and 26 remain operational. But last April marked the first time a Global Hawk had been used for Earth science.

As scientists and NASA officials gathered inside a Dryden hangar to admire Air Vehicle-1, the first Global Hawk made, its sister airplane, AV-6, was heading up the Pacific Northwest coast on a 24-hour tour, one of five flights planned as part of the Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac) mission, a joint effort between NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to demonstrate the aircraft’s scientific utility.