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Aerospace engineering researchers are testing a small-scale, unpiloted aircraft model in Antarctica. The full-scale Meridian Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) will eventually collect data on glaciers in Antarctica.
Aired January 8, 2007
Transcript
Imagine an 8-hour workday, a thousand-meters above the ground--in temperatures 40-degrees below zero.With your research minute, I'm Brandis Griffith-researchers in aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas are working to build an aircraft up to the task in order to collect more information on glaciers in Antarctica.
It's called the Meridian unmanned aerial vehicle and it would have to make that trip of 18-hundred kilometers without a pilot.
Associate professor Rick Hale is working with teams in the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets throughout the process.
They're constructing the aircraft and enhancing the radar used to collect data on the ice where the glacier meets the bedrock.
“To know is there water down there, is there rock, is the rock being ground up by the motion and therefore acting like marbles and allowing the glacier to slide along that, we just don’t know.”
Researchers will put the meridian aircraft to use in Greenland in 2008 and Antarctica in 2009.
For information on this Research Minute, log on to research minute-dot-k-u-dot-e-d-u.
From the University of Kansas, I'm Brandis Griffith.
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KU researchers head to Antarctica to test unpiloted aircraft model
LAWRENCE — Imagine traveling several hundred kilometers to work (say, the distance from Lawrence to Omaha), working a regular eight-hour day in temperatures 40 degrees below zero and then making the commute back home with loads of information.
