Five year UAV

LAS CRUCES Airborne technology that can monitor terror movements and analyze crop soil or even replace a region’s devastated telecommunications infrastructure in an instant will soon be tested in the skies 20 miles outside of Las Cruces.

New Mexico State University has landed a multimillion-dollar contract to help develop and test a new unmanned aircraft designed to stay aloft for five years.

The aircraft is planned to carry a 1,000-pound payload, produce 5 kilowatts of onboard power and withstand the buffeting winds encountered 60,000 to 90,000 feet above the Earth.

It’s a $5.5 million Vulture II Program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), or the “mad scientist” branch of the U.S. Department of Defense, as Dave May refers to it.

“I tell people that this is the kind of program that you tell your grandkids about,” said May, the deputy director of Global Unmanned Aircraft Systems Strategic Initiatives. He’s the program manager for NMSU’s Physical Science laboratory, which is the technical team charged with showing the world the value of this versatile technology. He was part of the buzz on Friday morning at NMSU’s O’Donnell Hall, where the university officially unveiled the project to the campus and community.

The Vulture II technology would enable the … unmanned aircraft to remain afloat for more than five years to provide a continual flow of “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance … over an area of interest,” according to a news release on the project. This has both military and commercial value, said Vimal Chaitanya, NMSU’s vice president for research.

“Instead of a satellite, you have a command center for war or a communication center for the Internet, or surveillance for border security,” he said. “You can also do non-defense uses, how your crop is doing, monitoring the fertilizer in your soil.”

Doug Davis, director of the Global UAS Strategic Initiatives for the PSL, elaborates: “It’s a ‘pseudo-satellite.’ If a situation like a tsunami or an earthquake destroys your infrastructure on the ground, you would have the ability to put the aircraft in orbit with an immediate capabilities replacement,” he said. “It would no longer take three years to replace the infrastructure, to replace phone service, Internet – all the telecommunications – it would take a day or two.”

The Boeing-designed aircraft will arrive to the 260-acre assembly grounds at the Jornada Range, on land owned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture just north of Las Cruces. Before it arrives, the facility necessary to put the complicated aircraft together needs to be constructed. It will consist of a 3,000-foot landing and launch pad, a hangar, a whole lot of airspace, and a team of experts.

“This is the only place this research can happen,” Chaitanya said. “The expertise that our employees have, the facilities available at the physical science lab, and the ability to fly the experimental plane in a large civilian air space” made the Las Cruces region the ideal location, he said.

The facility will be completed by the spring of 2013, said T. Bear Larson, the test director and manager of the project. The three-month process of assembling the aircraft then will begin leading to the five-flight testing of the aircraft in the summer of 2014.