NASA Launching Drone Mission to Figure Out How Hurricanes Form
Hurricane Ike Hurricane Ike on September 10, 2008, taken by the crew of the International Space Station. NASA is embarking on a hurricane research mission this weekend that will help explain how these storms form and intensify. NASAA Global Hawk and two other planes carrying cutting-edge instrumentation head up to study the 2010 storm season So far this hurricane season, the Atlantic has been quiet. That's good news for Gulf oil spill cleanup efforts, but a team of NASA and NOAA scientists are hoping things will get just a little nastier. This weekend, NASA is launching a six-week mission to study the formation and intensification of hurricanes, hoping to inform forecast models and improve hurricane prediction abilities. The GRIP experiment (for Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes) involves more than a dozen satellite-quality scientific instruments onboard a Global Hawk unmanned drone, a WB-57 research plane and a DC-8. It is timed to take...