AviationWeek.com/awst AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 23

AIRBUS

Graham Warwick Dallas

Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed push to break into the commercial unmanned-aircraft market

M ajor aerospace companies are bidding for a stake in the growing commercial unmanned aircraft mar-ket, but rather than developing new vehicles they

are targeting the business of providing services to large customers.

Airbus has formed a U.S.-based company called Air-bus Aerial to bring together commercial satellite and un-manned–aircraft remote-sensing capabilities to provide data collection and image-processing services to large and global enterprises.

A year after forming a commer-cial business unit, Boeing’s subsid-iary Insitu has unveiled a revamped suite of products and services aimed at large customers that includes the parent company’s satellite-imaging and unmanned surface and subsur-face vehicle capabilities.

Lockheed Martin is developing an inspection services business built around a commercial version of the Stalker XE small military un-manned aircraft system (UAS) and focused on linear inspection of pipe-lines, power lines and rail tracks as well as environmental monitoring.

General Atomics Aeronautics Systems, meanwhile, is assessing the commercial market as it develops a type-certifiable version of the Predator B medium-altitude, long-endurance UAS called the SkyGuard-ian. Small military UAS producer AeroVironment will begin selling a small commercial drone, Quantix, and data analytics to the agricultural market later this year. Large UAS maker Northrop Grumman, meanwhile, says it has no interest in the commercial market.

Airbus is seeking to gain traction in an unmanned-air-craft market where it has struggled to establish a foothold because of a fragmented European defense market. The others are looking for a way to expand out of a defense market that has slowed in the U.S. as industry waits for the Pentagon to launch development of the next generation of military UAS.

Airbus, Insitu and Lockheed all say they are targeting a commercial market where large customers are seeking con-sistently safe and high-quality data services, often globally. AeroVironment is starting in the U.S. but plans to sell its Quantix drone and analytics tools internationally

While there are already many competing providers of ei-ther satellite imagery or UAS services, Airbus Aerial’s mis-sion “is to bring all the different layers together,” says Jesse Kallman, president of the new Atlanta-based company.

With bases both in the U.S. and Europe, Airbus Aerial’s initial focus is on developing new imagery services using information provided by drones, satellites, high-altitude air-craft and other sources. These could include Airbus’s Zephyr high-altitude, long-endurance “pseudo-satellite” UAS.

Insitu’s Inexa Solutions brings together the company’s ScanEagle and Integrator small long-endurance UAS, its Inexa Control commercial ground control station, the Vi-dar maritime surface-search payload developed by Hood Technologies and Sentient Vision Systems, and Logos Technologies’ Redkite wide-area motion-imagery sensor, plus software tools for video processing, exploitation and dissemination.

When Insitu formed its commercial division a year ago, “we didn’t really know” what the business was going to be, says Jon Damush, vice president and general manager of Insitu Commercial. “What we did know was we had a capa-

bility set that we refer to as ‘from glass to glass,’ from the sensors all the way through the data collection, transmission, processing, analytics and dissemination chain,” he says.

“What we didn’t know was where the value proposition was for the application of that technology and expertise in the commercial market, and what we have been able to gain over the past year through engagement with partners/customers is an understanding of their business, and where the challenges and opportunities for efficiencies are,” says Damush.

“And that solution in many cases does not involve the sale of a ScanEagle. It might involve the use of a ScanEagle, it might not, but the point is we bring an aerial-remote-sens-ing expertise to that customer set,” he says. The company has already partnered with PrecisionHawk in using small UAS for precision agriculture, a market Insitu did not ad-dress, he adds.

Development of the new commercial offering has primar-ily been driven by the needs of large and often global en-terprises. “They have the scale and scope of problems that our capability set and expertise help solve, says Damush.

UNMANNED AVIATION

Drone Play

Airbus Aerial will bring together satellite imaging with data from

different classes of UAS.

24 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 AviationWeek.com/awst

“The pieces exist. It is a matter of adding layers that will be impactful for large commercial customers such as the global insurance companies,” Kallman says. Other target markets include utilities and state and local governments that need in-formation urgently to respond to severe weather events. “This is not a multiyear effort. We will get into the market and begin supporting customers this year,” he says.

Lockheed is working with “a couple of pilot customers” and developing the analytical tools to deliver tailored data to dif-ferent customers within key markets, says Sheehan. The com-pany plans to launch inspection services with the commercial LM-XE UAS by early 2018.

Insitu Pacific, based in Sydney, is performing most of the Boeing subsidiary’s operations for large commercial cus-

tomers. “What we have learned, particularly in Australia, is that large enterprises we are beginning to work with are looking for more than data collection or flying UAS,” says Vince Vidal, director of commercial solutions. “As a result, Insitu has reorganized its commercial division to position ourselves to provide end-to-end solutions to our customers.”

“There are a lot of players in the different layers of what we are doing, but the drone-specific companies focus on drones, and small companies address regional issues,” says Kallman. “We want to take the technology a step beyond the aircraft. Large customers want data around the globe, on demand.” As well as consistency and quality, safety is key. “We are still dealing with aviation, and assets that fly over people and critical infrastructure,” he says. c

SPACE

AviationWeek.com/awst AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 25

Frank Morring, Jr. Washington

Pluto probe exploring Kuiper Belten route to its next flyby target

“And they are of the scale that makes sense for a company like Boeing and Insitu.”

Large customers are welcoming the major aerospace com-panies entering the market because they are looking for “a professional product and a professional service,” says John Sheehan, general manager for commercial aviation inspec-tion at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. Several of the customers Lockheed is working with have tried unsuccessfully to operate their own UAS or use service providers, he says. “For larger customers, globally, it’s about doing it professionally.”

There are a lot of smaller players in a small commercial UAS industry that is “migrating toward services and data,” says Kallman. “For most people, drones are a means to an end, a way to collect data. Airbus has the structure and technology

to allow it to do that for them.” Kallman has 12 years’ experi-ence in the UAS industry and joined Airbus in February from Airware, a San Francisco-based startup that develops cloud software to manage drone operations and data collection.

Aerial has been established by Airbus Defense and Space, but “is more a startup than a division,” Kallman says. The new company will work across Airbus to bring together services for large customers. “Airbus is a unique player,” he says. “It has an industry-leading satellite business, both the constellation and the data management, and it can get the data off the satellite and turn it into something impactful.” Airbus already has a service in France, called FarmStar, which provides imagery data to large farms and agricultural companies. “Now we can put that together with data from drones,” he says.

UNMANNED AVIATION

Kuiper Belt Observatory

Early in June, a team of about 50 astronomers will spread out across South America and South-

ern Africa to attempt an unprecedented observation of a small body 1 billion mi. beyond Pluto. If it works, it will help en-sure NASA’s New Horizons probe will not smash into an obstacle at 30,000 mph when it encounters its next Kuiper Belt Object (KBO).

The nuclear-powered spacecraft that rewrote the textbooks on Pluto is hurtling toward a tiny frozen chunk of primordial material designated 2014 MU69, a “cold classical” KBO that mea-sures about 40 km (25 mi.) across. If all goes as planned, New Horizons will pass as close as 3,000 km to the object on New Year’s Eve 2019, using its seven in-struments to reprise the highly success-ful July 14, 2015, encounter with Pluto.

The two-person astronomy teams in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere will set up telescope “fences” there in an ambi-tious effort to catch the brief flicker in a bright distant star that a moon or ring around MU69 would cause as the tiny KBO passes in front of it. The technique has been used before, but not for a tiny object in the Kuiper Belt.

“It’s due diligence,” says Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, explaining how measuring the shadows cast by the three stellar occultations coming up in June and July can alert New Horizons navigators to hazards

they must avoid in passing the target. NASA’s airborne SOFIA telescope (for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) is also scheduled to take part in some of the observations.

About 30% of cold classical KBOs ob-served from Earth have moons, Stern says, and one has been found to have rings. Either could destroy the space-craft in a collision just as it collects the data that will take the ensuing 20 months to stream home.

“We’re the only spacecraft in the Kui-per Belt,” Stern says. “We’re the only one planned to go to the Kuiper Belt. I expect that there will be more missions, but they’re not going to be returning data in the 2020s.”

New Horizons is in hibernation right now, switched off on April 7 after downloading its data take from Pluto and deeper into the Kuiper Belt at a few thousand kilobits per second. In September, it will power back up to continue taking advantage of its unique position in space to collect data on the environment within the Kuiper Belt, a little-understood region beyond the or-bit of Neptune that includes Pluto and several other dwarf planets, as well as countless small bodies like MU69.

The spacecraft also observed the Kuiper Belt for six months before going into hibernation, using its plasma and dust instruments to gain unprecedent-ed in situ data on the region’s environ-

ment and the way it interacts with the solar wind. Along the way, it has studied KBOs that happened to be within range as it passed on its way to MU69.

“These distant observations of KBOs are already showing us they are a very heterogeneous population,” says Stern. “They have different numbers of satel-lites, surface properties, rotation peri-ods and shapes, and we are measuring all this.”

New Horizons is funded for an ex-tended mission until May 1, 2021, and Stern says it is almost certain the team will apply for another mission extension after that. For now, though, the group that dazzled the world with its Pluto data is beginning to get ready for the next flyby.

The probe may pass as close as 3,000 km to the object if no obstacles are dis-covered. If something is in the way, the mission will use a backup trajectory that will take it as far out as 20,000 km. The primary trajectory should reveal details as small as 25 m (82 ft.) across, compared to 80 m at Pluto, but

because the KBO is tiny, it will continue to occupy only a few pixels in the imager until flyby day.

That is pretty much what it looks like today in the Hubble Space Telescope imagery the team is using to refine its track on the object’s orbit around the Sun (see inset photo). At Pluto, by com-parison, significant surface details be-gan to resolve months before the flyby.

The New Horizons team will take over optical navigation from Hubble with the spacecraft’s Long-Range Re-connaissance Imager (LORRI) in Sep-tember 2018, refining the commands to take the probe through its prime or backup trajectories.

The spacecraft’s path has been peri-odically adjusted with propulsion burns as it approaches the target KBO, with the next opportunity due on May 25. Af-ter its summer in hibernation and Sep-tember awakening, it will sleep again until May 2018.

At that point, it will awaken to begin preparations for the flyby. Full-scale operations will start in July 2018, as

it homes in on its target. LORRI will scan the path ahead for obstacles, and the instruments will begin focusing on the target. By then the KBO will have a name, selected in a contest NASA plans to kick off this fall, instead of the cur-rent alphanumeric designation.

The flyby itself will come on Dec. 31, 2019, controlled at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Columbia, Maryland, where the mission team also gathered for the Pluto flyby.

“On flyby day, we will swoop right down and study the surface geology, the surface composition,” says Stern. “We will map both of those. We’ll look for a coma—an atmosphere—and any other signs of active processes that are going on. We’ll search for satellites. If there are satellites, we’ll map them as well.”

As with Pluto, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) will ping MU69 with radio signals after New Horizons passes by for bistatic radar-occultation mea-surements of any atmosphere that may be present. The target’s greater range and smaller size present new challenges for DNS operators and the New Hori-zons Radio Experiment scientists.

“In the case of Pluto, the field of view of the radio instrument was just on a portion, because it was so large in the sky from our position,” Stern says. “This time, the target is smaller than the field of view, so we get a whole-body measurement. And because it is smaller the signal is weaker, but all the predic-tion calculations show that we ought to be able to get this and compare it to asteroids and comets and other small

bodies in the inner Solar System.”A decade ago, New Horizons teamed

with Europe’s Rosetta comet-landing mission for a joint study of Jupiter as the two probes flew through the gas gi-ant’s neighborhood. Ultimately, Rosetta provided unprecedented imagery and other data on the comet 67P/Churyu-mov-Gerasimenko, another icy body that originated in the Kuiper Belt.

Unlike the comet, MU69 has been in place since the early days of the Solar System, unchanged by a close passage to the Sun. That “pristine” condition should hold clues to the formation of the larger bodies in the Solar System and, by extension, to the formation of exoplanets that orbit stars with similar belts of smaller bodies.

“All the small KBOs are the building blocks of the dwarf planets but also the giant planets,” says Stern. “It is so cold out there that it’s essentially a deep freeze. It’s like an archaeological dig in the origin of the Solar System because everything is just frozen.”

It took about 4.5 hr. for New Horizons data, traveling at the speed of light, to reach the DSN from the vicinity of Pluto. Now, with another billion miles traveled, it will take 6 hr., Stern says. As with Pluto, the team will not know for sure if New Horizons survived the en-counter until the first signals are routed from the DSN antennas into the control center at APL. If it does, the imagery and other data will be trickling in for almost two years after that.

“It might look like a comet or an as-teroid, but every time we go to a new class of object we find ourselves scratch-ing our heads,” Stern says. “New Hori-zons is not only going to do a flyby of a new class of object with MU69, but also the farthest flyby, the farthest explora-tion, in the history of humankind.” c

The New Horizons Pluto probe is on the way to a flyby of its second Kui-per Belt Object in 2019. The Hubble is tracking the tiny object (inset).

NASA, ESA, SWRI, JHU/APL, NEW HORIZONS KBO RESEARCH TEAM

24 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 AviationWeek.com/awst

“The pieces exist. It is a matter of adding layers that will be impactful for large commercial customers such as the global insurance companies,” Kallman says. Other target markets include utilities and state and local governments that need in-formation urgently to respond to severe weather events. “This is not a multiyear effort. We will get into the market and begin supporting customers this year,” he says.

Lockheed is working with “a couple of pilot customers” and developing the analytical tools to deliver tailored data to dif-ferent customers within key markets, says Sheehan. The com-pany plans to launch inspection services with the commercial LM-XE UAS by early 2018.

Insitu Pacific, based in Sydney, is performing most of the Boeing subsidiary’s operations for large commercial cus-

tomers. “What we have learned, particularly in Australia, is that large enterprises we are beginning to work with are looking for more than data collection or flying UAS,” says Vince Vidal, director of commercial solutions. “As a result, Insitu has reorganized its commercial division to position ourselves to provide end-to-end solutions to our customers.”

“There are a lot of players in the different layers of what we are doing, but the drone-specific companies focus on drones, and small companies address regional issues,” says Kallman. “We want to take the technology a step beyond the aircraft. Large customers want data around the globe, on demand.” As well as consistency and quality, safety is key. “We are still dealing with aviation, and assets that fly over people and critical infrastructure,” he says. c

SPACE

AviationWeek.com/awst AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 25

Frank Morring, Jr. Washington

Pluto probe exploring Kuiper Belten route to its next flyby target

“And they are of the scale that makes sense for a company like Boeing and Insitu.”

Large customers are welcoming the major aerospace com-panies entering the market because they are looking for “a professional product and a professional service,” says John Sheehan, general manager for commercial aviation inspec-tion at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. Several of the customers Lockheed is working with have tried unsuccessfully to operate their own UAS or use service providers, he says. “For larger customers, globally, it’s about doing it professionally.”

There are a lot of smaller players in a small commercial UAS industry that is “migrating toward services and data,” says Kallman. “For most people, drones are a means to an end, a way to collect data. Airbus has the structure and technology

to allow it to do that for them.” Kallman has 12 years’ experi-ence in the UAS industry and joined Airbus in February from Airware, a San Francisco-based startup that develops cloud software to manage drone operations and data collection.

Aerial has been established by Airbus Defense and Space, but “is more a startup than a division,” Kallman says. The new company will work across Airbus to bring together services for large customers. “Airbus is a unique player,” he says. “It has an industry-leading satellite business, both the constellation and the data management, and it can get the data off the satellite and turn it into something impactful.” Airbus already has a service in France, called FarmStar, which provides imagery data to large farms and agricultural companies. “Now we can put that together with data from drones,” he says.

UNMANNED AVIATION

Kuiper Belt Observatory

Early in June, a team of about 50 astronomers will spread out across South America and South-

ern Africa to attempt an unprecedented observation of a small body 1 billion mi. beyond Pluto. If it works, it will help en-sure NASA’s New Horizons probe will not smash into an obstacle at 30,000 mph when it encounters its next Kuiper Belt Object (KBO).

The nuclear-powered spacecraft that rewrote the textbooks on Pluto is hurtling toward a tiny frozen chunk of primordial material designated 2014 MU69, a “cold classical” KBO that mea-sures about 40 km (25 mi.) across. If all goes as planned, New Horizons will pass as close as 3,000 km to the object on New Year’s Eve 2019, using its seven in-struments to reprise the highly success-ful July 14, 2015, encounter with Pluto.

The two-person astronomy teams in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere will set up telescope “fences” there in an ambi-tious effort to catch the brief flicker in a bright distant star that a moon or ring around MU69 would cause as the tiny KBO passes in front of it. The technique has been used before, but not for a tiny object in the Kuiper Belt.

“It’s due diligence,” says Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, explaining how measuring the shadows cast by the three stellar occultations coming up in June and July can alert New Horizons navigators to hazards

they must avoid in passing the target. NASA’s airborne SOFIA telescope (for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) is also scheduled to take part in some of the observations.

About 30% of cold classical KBOs ob-served from Earth have moons, Stern says, and one has been found to have rings. Either could destroy the space-craft in a collision just as it collects the data that will take the ensuing 20 months to stream home.

“We’re the only spacecraft in the Kui-per Belt,” Stern says. “We’re the only one planned to go to the Kuiper Belt. I expect that there will be more missions, but they’re not going to be returning data in the 2020s.”

New Horizons is in hibernation right now, switched off on April 7 after downloading its data take from Pluto and deeper into the Kuiper Belt at a few thousand kilobits per second. In September, it will power back up to continue taking advantage of its unique position in space to collect data on the environment within the Kuiper Belt, a little-understood region beyond the or-bit of Neptune that includes Pluto and several other dwarf planets, as well as countless small bodies like MU69.

The spacecraft also observed the Kuiper Belt for six months before going into hibernation, using its plasma and dust instruments to gain unprecedent-ed in situ data on the region’s environ-

ment and the way it interacts with the solar wind. Along the way, it has studied KBOs that happened to be within range as it passed on its way to MU69.

“These distant observations of KBOs are already showing us they are a very heterogeneous population,” says Stern. “They have different numbers of satel-lites, surface properties, rotation peri-ods and shapes, and we are measuring all this.”

New Horizons is funded for an ex-tended mission until May 1, 2021, and Stern says it is almost certain the team will apply for another mission extension after that. For now, though, the group that dazzled the world with its Pluto data is beginning to get ready for the next flyby.

The probe may pass as close as 3,000 km to the object if no obstacles are dis-covered. If something is in the way, the mission will use a backup trajectory that will take it as far out as 20,000 km. The primary trajectory should reveal details as small as 25 m (82 ft.) across, compared to 80 m at Pluto, but

because the KBO is tiny, it will continue to occupy only a few pixels in the imager until flyby day.

That is pretty much what it looks like today in the Hubble Space Telescope imagery the team is using to refine its track on the object’s orbit around the Sun (see inset photo). At Pluto, by com-parison, significant surface details be-gan to resolve months before the flyby.

The New Horizons team will take over optical navigation from Hubble with the spacecraft’s Long-Range Re-connaissance Imager (LORRI) in Sep-tember 2018, refining the commands to take the probe through its prime or backup trajectories.

The spacecraft’s path has been peri-odically adjusted with propulsion burns as it approaches the target KBO, with the next opportunity due on May 25. Af-ter its summer in hibernation and Sep-tember awakening, it will sleep again until May 2018.

At that point, it will awaken to begin preparations for the flyby. Full-scale operations will start in July 2018, as

it homes in on its target. LORRI will scan the path ahead for obstacles, and the instruments will begin focusing on the target. By then the KBO will have a name, selected in a contest NASA plans to kick off this fall, instead of the cur-rent alphanumeric designation.

The flyby itself will come on Dec. 31, 2019, controlled at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Columbia, Maryland, where the mission team also gathered for the Pluto flyby.

“On flyby day, we will swoop right down and study the surface geology, the surface composition,” says Stern. “We will map both of those. We’ll look for a coma—an atmosphere—and any other signs of active processes that are going on. We’ll search for satellites. If there are satellites, we’ll map them as well.”

As with Pluto, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) will ping MU69 with radio signals after New Horizons passes by for bistatic radar-occultation mea-surements of any atmosphere that may be present. The target’s greater range and smaller size present new challenges for DNS operators and the New Hori-zons Radio Experiment scientists.

“In the case of Pluto, the field of view of the radio instrument was just on a portion, because it was so large in the sky from our position,” Stern says. “This time, the target is smaller than the field of view, so we get a whole-body measurement. And because it is smaller the signal is weaker, but all the predic-tion calculations show that we ought to be able to get this and compare it to asteroids and comets and other small

bodies in the inner Solar System.”A decade ago, New Horizons teamed

with Europe’s Rosetta comet-landing mission for a joint study of Jupiter as the two probes flew through the gas gi-ant’s neighborhood. Ultimately, Rosetta provided unprecedented imagery and other data on the comet 67P/Churyu-mov-Gerasimenko, another icy body that originated in the Kuiper Belt.

Unlike the comet, MU69 has been in place since the early days of the Solar System, unchanged by a close passage to the Sun. That “pristine” condition should hold clues to the formation of the larger bodies in the Solar System and, by extension, to the formation of exoplanets that orbit stars with similar belts of smaller bodies.

“All the small KBOs are the building blocks of the dwarf planets but also the giant planets,” says Stern. “It is so cold out there that it’s essentially a deep freeze. It’s like an archaeological dig in the origin of the Solar System because everything is just frozen.”

It took about 4.5 hr. for New Horizons data, traveling at the speed of light, to reach the DSN from the vicinity of Pluto. Now, with another billion miles traveled, it will take 6 hr., Stern says. As with Pluto, the team will not know for sure if New Horizons survived the en-counter until the first signals are routed from the DSN antennas into the control center at APL. If it does, the imagery and other data will be trickling in for almost two years after that.

“It might look like a comet or an as-teroid, but every time we go to a new class of object we find ourselves scratch-ing our heads,” Stern says. “New Hori-zons is not only going to do a flyby of a new class of object with MU69, but also the farthest flyby, the farthest explora-tion, in the history of humankind.” c

The New Horizons Pluto probe is on the way to a flyby of its second Kui-per Belt Object in 2019. The Hubble is tracking the tiny object (inset).

NASA, ESA, SWRI, JHU/APL, NEW HORIZONS KBO RESEARCH TEAM

24 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 AviationWeek.com/awst

“The pieces exist. It is a matter of adding layers that will be impactful for large commercial customers such as the global insurance companies,” Kallman says. Other target markets include utilities and state and local governments that need in-formation urgently to respond to severe weather events. “This is not a multiyear effort. We will get into the market and begin supporting customers this year,” he says.

Lockheed is working with “a couple of pilot customers” and developing the analytical tools to deliver tailored data to dif-ferent customers within key markets, says Sheehan. The com-pany plans to launch inspection services with the commercial LM-XE UAS by early 2018.

Insitu Pacific, based in Sydney, is performing most of the Boeing subsidiary’s operations for large commercial cus-

tomers. “What we have learned, particularly in Australia, is that large enterprises we are beginning to work with are looking for more than data collection or flying UAS,” says Vince Vidal, director of commercial solutions. “As a result, Insitu has reorganized its commercial division to position ourselves to provide end-to-end solutions to our customers.”

“There are a lot of players in the different layers of what we are doing, but the drone-specific companies focus on drones, and small companies address regional issues,” says Kallman. “We want to take the technology a step beyond the aircraft. Large customers want data around the globe, on demand.” As well as consistency and quality, safety is key. “We are still dealing with aviation, and assets that fly over people and critical infrastructure,” he says. c

SPACE

AviationWeek.com/awst AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 25

Frank Morring, Jr. Washington

Pluto probe exploring Kuiper Belten route to its next flyby target

“And they are of the scale that makes sense for a company like Boeing and Insitu.”

Large customers are welcoming the major aerospace com-panies entering the market because they are looking for “a professional product and a professional service,” says John Sheehan, general manager for commercial aviation inspec-tion at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. Several of the customers Lockheed is working with have tried unsuccessfully to operate their own UAS or use service providers, he says. “For larger customers, globally, it’s about doing it professionally.”

There are a lot of smaller players in a small commercial UAS industry that is “migrating toward services and data,” says Kallman. “For most people, drones are a means to an end, a way to collect data. Airbus has the structure and technology

to allow it to do that for them.” Kallman has 12 years’ experi-ence in the UAS industry and joined Airbus in February from Airware, a San Francisco-based startup that develops cloud software to manage drone operations and data collection.

Aerial has been established by Airbus Defense and Space, but “is more a startup than a division,” Kallman says. The new company will work across Airbus to bring together services for large customers. “Airbus is a unique player,” he says. “It has an industry-leading satellite business, both the constellation and the data management, and it can get the data off the satellite and turn it into something impactful.” Airbus already has a service in France, called FarmStar, which provides imagery data to large farms and agricultural companies. “Now we can put that together with data from drones,” he says.

UNMANNED AVIATION

Kuiper Belt Observatory

Early in June, a team of about 50 astronomers will spread out across South America and South-

ern Africa to attempt an unprecedented observation of a small body 1 billion mi. beyond Pluto. If it works, it will help en-sure NASA’s New Horizons probe will not smash into an obstacle at 30,000 mph when it encounters its next Kuiper Belt Object (KBO).

The nuclear-powered spacecraft that rewrote the textbooks on Pluto is hurtling toward a tiny frozen chunk of primordial material designated 2014 MU69, a “cold classical” KBO that mea-sures about 40 km (25 mi.) across. If all goes as planned, New Horizons will pass as close as 3,000 km to the object on New Year’s Eve 2019, using its seven in-struments to reprise the highly success-ful July 14, 2015, encounter with Pluto.

The two-person astronomy teams in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere will set up telescope “fences” there in an ambi-tious effort to catch the brief flicker in a bright distant star that a moon or ring around MU69 would cause as the tiny KBO passes in front of it. The technique has been used before, but not for a tiny object in the Kuiper Belt.

“It’s due diligence,” says Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, explaining how measuring the shadows cast by the three stellar occultations coming up in June and July can alert New Horizons navigators to hazards

they must avoid in passing the target. NASA’s airborne SOFIA telescope (for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) is also scheduled to take part in some of the observations.

About 30% of cold classical KBOs ob-served from Earth have moons, Stern says, and one has been found to have rings. Either could destroy the space-craft in a collision just as it collects the data that will take the ensuing 20 months to stream home.

“We’re the only spacecraft in the Kui-per Belt,” Stern says. “We’re the only one planned to go to the Kuiper Belt. I expect that there will be more missions, but they’re not going to be returning data in the 2020s.”

New Horizons is in hibernation right now, switched off on April 7 after downloading its data take from Pluto and deeper into the Kuiper Belt at a few thousand kilobits per second. In September, it will power back up to continue taking advantage of its unique position in space to collect data on the environment within the Kuiper Belt, a little-understood region beyond the or-bit of Neptune that includes Pluto and several other dwarf planets, as well as countless small bodies like MU69.

The spacecraft also observed the Kuiper Belt for six months before going into hibernation, using its plasma and dust instruments to gain unprecedent-ed in situ data on the region’s environ-

ment and the way it interacts with the solar wind. Along the way, it has studied KBOs that happened to be within range as it passed on its way to MU69.

“These distant observations of KBOs are already showing us they are a very heterogeneous population,” says Stern. “They have different numbers of satel-lites, surface properties, rotation peri-ods and shapes, and we are measuring all this.”

New Horizons is funded for an ex-tended mission until May 1, 2021, and Stern says it is almost certain the team will apply for another mission extension after that. For now, though, the group that dazzled the world with its Pluto data is beginning to get ready for the next flyby.

The probe may pass as close as 3,000 km to the object if no obstacles are dis-covered. If something is in the way, the mission will use a backup trajectory that will take it as far out as 20,000 km. The primary trajectory should reveal details as small as 25 m (82 ft.) across, compared to 80 m at Pluto, but

because the KBO is tiny, it will continue to occupy only a few pixels in the imager until flyby day.

That is pretty much what it looks like today in the Hubble Space Telescope imagery the team is using to refine its track on the object’s orbit around the Sun (see inset photo). At Pluto, by com-parison, significant surface details be-gan to resolve months before the flyby.

The New Horizons team will take over optical navigation from Hubble with the spacecraft’s Long-Range Re-connaissance Imager (LORRI) in Sep-tember 2018, refining the commands to take the probe through its prime or backup trajectories.

The spacecraft’s path has been peri-odically adjusted with propulsion burns as it approaches the target KBO, with the next opportunity due on May 25. Af-ter its summer in hibernation and Sep-tember awakening, it will sleep again until May 2018.

At that point, it will awaken to begin preparations for the flyby. Full-scale operations will start in July 2018, as

it homes in on its target. LORRI will scan the path ahead for obstacles, and the instruments will begin focusing on the target. By then the KBO will have a name, selected in a contest NASA plans to kick off this fall, instead of the cur-rent alphanumeric designation.

The flyby itself will come on Dec. 31, 2019, controlled at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Columbia, Maryland, where the mission team also gathered for the Pluto flyby.

“On flyby day, we will swoop right down and study the surface geology, the surface composition,” says Stern. “We will map both of those. We’ll look for a coma—an atmosphere—and any other signs of active processes that are going on. We’ll search for satellites. If there are satellites, we’ll map them as well.”

As with Pluto, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) will ping MU69 with radio signals after New Horizons passes by for bistatic radar-occultation mea-surements of any atmosphere that may be present. The target’s greater range and smaller size present new challenges for DNS operators and the New Hori-zons Radio Experiment scientists.

“In the case of Pluto, the field of view of the radio instrument was just on a portion, because it was so large in the sky from our position,” Stern says. “This time, the target is smaller than the field of view, so we get a whole-body measurement. And because it is smaller the signal is weaker, but all the predic-tion calculations show that we ought to be able to get this and compare it to asteroids and comets and other small

bodies in the inner Solar System.”A decade ago, New Horizons teamed

with Europe’s Rosetta comet-landing mission for a joint study of Jupiter as the two probes flew through the gas gi-ant’s neighborhood. Ultimately, Rosetta provided unprecedented imagery and other data on the comet 67P/Churyu-mov-Gerasimenko, another icy body that originated in the Kuiper Belt.

Unlike the comet, MU69 has been in place since the early days of the Solar System, unchanged by a close passage to the Sun. That “pristine” condition should hold clues to the formation of the larger bodies in the Solar System and, by extension, to the formation of exoplanets that orbit stars with similar belts of smaller bodies.

“All the small KBOs are the building blocks of the dwarf planets but also the giant planets,” says Stern. “It is so cold out there that it’s essentially a deep freeze. It’s like an archaeological dig in the origin of the Solar System because everything is just frozen.”

It took about 4.5 hr. for New Horizons data, traveling at the speed of light, to reach the DSN from the vicinity of Pluto. Now, with another billion miles traveled, it will take 6 hr., Stern says. As with Pluto, the team will not know for sure if New Horizons survived the en-counter until the first signals are routed from the DSN antennas into the control center at APL. If it does, the imagery and other data will be trickling in for almost two years after that.

“It might look like a comet or an as-teroid, but every time we go to a new class of object we find ourselves scratch-ing our heads,” Stern says. “New Hori-zons is not only going to do a flyby of a new class of object with MU69, but also the farthest flyby, the farthest explora-tion, in the history of humankind.” c

The New Horizons Pluto probe is on the way to a flyby of its second Kui-per Belt Object in 2019. The Hubble is tracking the tiny object (inset).

NASA, ESA, SWRI, JHU/APL, NEW HORIZONS KBO RESEARCH TEAM

24 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 AviationWeek.com/awst

“The pieces exist. It is a matter of adding layers that will be impactful for large commercial customers such as the global insurance companies,” Kallman says. Other target markets include utilities and state and local governments that need in-formation urgently to respond to severe weather events. “This is not a multiyear effort. We will get into the market and begin supporting customers this year,” he says.

Lockheed is working with “a couple of pilot customers” and developing the analytical tools to deliver tailored data to dif-ferent customers within key markets, says Sheehan. The com-pany plans to launch inspection services with the commercial LM-XE UAS by early 2018.

Insitu Pacific, based in Sydney, is performing most of the Boeing subsidiary’s operations for large commercial cus-

tomers. “What we have learned, particularly in Australia, is that large enterprises we are beginning to work with are looking for more than data collection or flying UAS,” says Vince Vidal, director of commercial solutions. “As a result, Insitu has reorganized its commercial division to position ourselves to provide end-to-end solutions to our customers.”

“There are a lot of players in the different layers of what we are doing, but the drone-specific companies focus on drones, and small companies address regional issues,” says Kallman. “We want to take the technology a step beyond the aircraft. Large customers want data around the globe, on demand.” As well as consistency and quality, safety is key. “We are still dealing with aviation, and assets that fly over people and critical infrastructure,” he says. c

SPACE

AviationWeek.com/awst AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 25

Frank Morring, Jr. Washington

Pluto probe exploring Kuiper Belten route to its next flyby target

“And they are of the scale that makes sense for a company like Boeing and Insitu.”

Large customers are welcoming the major aerospace com-panies entering the market because they are looking for “a professional product and a professional service,” says John Sheehan, general manager for commercial aviation inspec-tion at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. Several of the customers Lockheed is working with have tried unsuccessfully to operate their own UAS or use service providers, he says. “For larger customers, globally, it’s about doing it professionally.”

There are a lot of smaller players in a small commercial UAS industry that is “migrating toward services and data,” says Kallman. “For most people, drones are a means to an end, a way to collect data. Airbus has the structure and technology

to allow it to do that for them.” Kallman has 12 years’ experi-ence in the UAS industry and joined Airbus in February from Airware, a San Francisco-based startup that develops cloud software to manage drone operations and data collection.

Aerial has been established by Airbus Defense and Space, but “is more a startup than a division,” Kallman says. The new company will work across Airbus to bring together services for large customers. “Airbus is a unique player,” he says. “It has an industry-leading satellite business, both the constellation and the data management, and it can get the data off the satellite and turn it into something impactful.” Airbus already has a service in France, called FarmStar, which provides imagery data to large farms and agricultural companies. “Now we can put that together with data from drones,” he says.

UNMANNED AVIATION

Kuiper Belt Observatory

Early in June, a team of about 50 astronomers will spread out across South America and South-

ern Africa to attempt an unprecedented observation of a small body 1 billion mi. beyond Pluto. If it works, it will help en-sure NASA’s New Horizons probe will not smash into an obstacle at 30,000 mph when it encounters its next Kuiper Belt Object (KBO).

The nuclear-powered spacecraft that rewrote the textbooks on Pluto is hurtling toward a tiny frozen chunk of primordial material designated 2014 MU69, a “cold classical” KBO that mea-sures about 40 km (25 mi.) across. If all goes as planned, New Horizons will pass as close as 3,000 km to the object on New Year’s Eve 2019, using its seven in-struments to reprise the highly success-ful July 14, 2015, encounter with Pluto.

The two-person astronomy teams in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere will set up telescope “fences” there in an ambi-tious effort to catch the brief flicker in a bright distant star that a moon or ring around MU69 would cause as the tiny KBO passes in front of it. The technique has been used before, but not for a tiny object in the Kuiper Belt.

“It’s due diligence,” says Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, explaining how measuring the shadows cast by the three stellar occultations coming up in June and July can alert New Horizons navigators to hazards

they must avoid in passing the target. NASA’s airborne SOFIA telescope (for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) is also scheduled to take part in some of the observations.

About 30% of cold classical KBOs ob-served from Earth have moons, Stern says, and one has been found to have rings. Either could destroy the space-craft in a collision just as it collects the data that will take the ensuing 20 months to stream home.

“We’re the only spacecraft in the Kui-per Belt,” Stern says. “We’re the only one planned to go to the Kuiper Belt. I expect that there will be more missions, but they’re not going to be returning data in the 2020s.”

New Horizons is in hibernation right now, switched off on April 7 after downloading its data take from Pluto and deeper into the Kuiper Belt at a few thousand kilobits per second. In September, it will power back up to continue taking advantage of its unique position in space to collect data on the environment within the Kuiper Belt, a little-understood region beyond the or-bit of Neptune that includes Pluto and several other dwarf planets, as well as countless small bodies like MU69.

The spacecraft also observed the Kuiper Belt for six months before going into hibernation, using its plasma and dust instruments to gain unprecedent-ed in situ data on the region’s environ-

ment and the way it interacts with the solar wind. Along the way, it has studied KBOs that happened to be within range as it passed on its way to MU69.

“These distant observations of KBOs are already showing us they are a very heterogeneous population,” says Stern. “They have different numbers of satel-lites, surface properties, rotation peri-ods and shapes, and we are measuring all this.”

New Horizons is funded for an ex-tended mission until May 1, 2021, and Stern says it is almost certain the team will apply for another mission extension after that. For now, though, the group that dazzled the world with its Pluto data is beginning to get ready for the next flyby.

The probe may pass as close as 3,000 km to the object if no obstacles are dis-covered. If something is in the way, the mission will use a backup trajectory that will take it as far out as 20,000 km. The primary trajectory should reveal details as small as 25 m (82 ft.) across, compared to 80 m at Pluto, but

because the KBO is tiny, it will continue to occupy only a few pixels in the imager until flyby day.

That is pretty much what it looks like today in the Hubble Space Telescope imagery the team is using to refine its track on the object’s orbit around the Sun (see inset photo). At Pluto, by com-parison, significant surface details be-gan to resolve months before the flyby.

The New Horizons team will take over optical navigation from Hubble with the spacecraft’s Long-Range Re-connaissance Imager (LORRI) in Sep-tember 2018, refining the commands to take the probe through its prime or backup trajectories.

The spacecraft’s path has been peri-odically adjusted with propulsion burns as it approaches the target KBO, with the next opportunity due on May 25. Af-ter its summer in hibernation and Sep-tember awakening, it will sleep again until May 2018.

At that point, it will awaken to begin preparations for the flyby. Full-scale operations will start in July 2018, as

it homes in on its target. LORRI will scan the path ahead for obstacles, and the instruments will begin focusing on the target. By then the KBO will have a name, selected in a contest NASA plans to kick off this fall, instead of the cur-rent alphanumeric designation.

The flyby itself will come on Dec. 31, 2019, controlled at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Columbia, Maryland, where the mission team also gathered for the Pluto flyby.

“On flyby day, we will swoop right down and study the surface geology, the surface composition,” says Stern. “We will map both of those. We’ll look for a coma—an atmosphere—and any other signs of active processes that are going on. We’ll search for satellites. If there are satellites, we’ll map them as well.”

As with Pluto, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) will ping MU69 with radio signals after New Horizons passes by for bistatic radar-occultation mea-surements of any atmosphere that may be present. The target’s greater range and smaller size present new challenges for DNS operators and the New Hori-zons Radio Experiment scientists.

“In the case of Pluto, the field of view of the radio instrument was just on a portion, because it was so large in the sky from our position,” Stern says. “This time, the target is smaller than the field of view, so we get a whole-body measurement. And because it is smaller the signal is weaker, but all the predic-tion calculations show that we ought to be able to get this and compare it to asteroids and comets and other small

bodies in the inner Solar System.”A decade ago, New Horizons teamed

with Europe’s Rosetta comet-landing mission for a joint study of Jupiter as the two probes flew through the gas gi-ant’s neighborhood. Ultimately, Rosetta provided unprecedented imagery and other data on the comet 67P/Churyu-mov-Gerasimenko, another icy body that originated in the Kuiper Belt.

Unlike the comet, MU69 has been in place since the early days of the Solar System, unchanged by a close passage to the Sun. That “pristine” condition should hold clues to the formation of the larger bodies in the Solar System and, by extension, to the formation of exoplanets that orbit stars with similar belts of smaller bodies.

“All the small KBOs are the building blocks of the dwarf planets but also the giant planets,” says Stern. “It is so cold out there that it’s essentially a deep freeze. It’s like an archaeological dig in the origin of the Solar System because everything is just frozen.”

It took about 4.5 hr. for New Horizons data, traveling at the speed of light, to reach the DSN from the vicinity of Pluto. Now, with another billion miles traveled, it will take 6 hr., Stern says. As with Pluto, the team will not know for sure if New Horizons survived the en-counter until the first signals are routed from the DSN antennas into the control center at APL. If it does, the imagery and other data will be trickling in for almost two years after that.

“It might look like a comet or an as-teroid, but every time we go to a new class of object we find ourselves scratch-ing our heads,” Stern says. “New Hori-zons is not only going to do a flyby of a new class of object with MU69, but also the farthest flyby, the farthest explora-tion, in the history of humankind.” c

The New Horizons Pluto probe is on the way to a flyby of its second Kui-per Belt Object in 2019. The Hubble is tracking the tiny object (inset).

NASA, ESA, SWRI, JHU/APL, NEW HORIZONS KBO RESEARCH TEAM

24 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 AviationWeek.com/awst

“The pieces exist. It is a matter of adding layers that will be impactful for large commercial customers such as the global insurance companies,” Kallman says. Other target markets include utilities and state and local governments that need in-formation urgently to respond to severe weather events. “This is not a multiyear effort. We will get into the market and begin supporting customers this year,” he says.

Lockheed is working with “a couple of pilot customers” and developing the analytical tools to deliver tailored data to dif-ferent customers within key markets, says Sheehan. The com-pany plans to launch inspection services with the commercial LM-XE UAS by early 2018.

Insitu Pacific, based in Sydney, is performing most of the Boeing subsidiary’s operations for large commercial cus-

tomers. “What we have learned, particularly in Australia, is that large enterprises we are beginning to work with are looking for more than data collection or flying UAS,” says Vince Vidal, director of commercial solutions. “As a result, Insitu has reorganized its commercial division to position ourselves to provide end-to-end solutions to our customers.”

“There are a lot of players in the different layers of what we are doing, but the drone-specific companies focus on drones, and small companies address regional issues,” says Kallman. “We want to take the technology a step beyond the aircraft. Large customers want data around the globe, on demand.” As well as consistency and quality, safety is key. “We are still dealing with aviation, and assets that fly over people and critical infrastructure,” he says. c

SPACE

AviationWeek.com/awst AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 25

Frank Morring, Jr. Washington

Pluto probe exploring Kuiper Belten route to its next flyby target

“And they are of the scale that makes sense for a company like Boeing and Insitu.”

Large customers are welcoming the major aerospace com-panies entering the market because they are looking for “a professional product and a professional service,” says John Sheehan, general manager for commercial aviation inspec-tion at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. Several of the customers Lockheed is working with have tried unsuccessfully to operate their own UAS or use service providers, he says. “For larger customers, globally, it’s about doing it professionally.”

There are a lot of smaller players in a small commercial UAS industry that is “migrating toward services and data,” says Kallman. “For most people, drones are a means to an end, a way to collect data. Airbus has the structure and technology

to allow it to do that for them.” Kallman has 12 years’ experi-ence in the UAS industry and joined Airbus in February from Airware, a San Francisco-based startup that develops cloud software to manage drone operations and data collection.

Aerial has been established by Airbus Defense and Space, but “is more a startup than a division,” Kallman says. The new company will work across Airbus to bring together services for large customers. “Airbus is a unique player,” he says. “It has an industry-leading satellite business, both the constellation and the data management, and it can get the data off the satellite and turn it into something impactful.” Airbus already has a service in France, called FarmStar, which provides imagery data to large farms and agricultural companies. “Now we can put that together with data from drones,” he says.

UNMANNED AVIATION

Kuiper Belt Observatory

Early in June, a team of about 50 astronomers will spread out across South America and South-

ern Africa to attempt an unprecedented observation of a small body 1 billion mi. beyond Pluto. If it works, it will help en-sure NASA’s New Horizons probe will not smash into an obstacle at 30,000 mph when it encounters its next Kuiper Belt Object (KBO).

The nuclear-powered spacecraft that rewrote the textbooks on Pluto is hurtling toward a tiny frozen chunk of primordial material designated 2014 MU69, a “cold classical” KBO that mea-sures about 40 km (25 mi.) across. If all goes as planned, New Horizons will pass as close as 3,000 km to the object on New Year’s Eve 2019, using its seven in-struments to reprise the highly success-ful July 14, 2015, encounter with Pluto.

The two-person astronomy teams in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere will set up telescope “fences” there in an ambi-tious effort to catch the brief flicker in a bright distant star that a moon or ring around MU69 would cause as the tiny KBO passes in front of it. The technique has been used before, but not for a tiny object in the Kuiper Belt.

“It’s due diligence,” says Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, explaining how measuring the shadows cast by the three stellar occultations coming up in June and July can alert New Horizons navigators to hazards

they must avoid in passing the target. NASA’s airborne SOFIA telescope (for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) is also scheduled to take part in some of the observations.

About 30% of cold classical KBOs ob-served from Earth have moons, Stern says, and one has been found to have rings. Either could destroy the space-craft in a collision just as it collects the data that will take the ensuing 20 months to stream home.

“We’re the only spacecraft in the Kui-per Belt,” Stern says. “We’re the only one planned to go to the Kuiper Belt. I expect that there will be more missions, but they’re not going to be returning data in the 2020s.”

New Horizons is in hibernation right now, switched off on April 7 after downloading its data take from Pluto and deeper into the Kuiper Belt at a few thousand kilobits per second. In September, it will power back up to continue taking advantage of its unique position in space to collect data on the environment within the Kuiper Belt, a little-understood region beyond the or-bit of Neptune that includes Pluto and several other dwarf planets, as well as countless small bodies like MU69.

The spacecraft also observed the Kuiper Belt for six months before going into hibernation, using its plasma and dust instruments to gain unprecedent-ed in situ data on the region’s environ-

ment and the way it interacts with the solar wind. Along the way, it has studied KBOs that happened to be within range as it passed on its way to MU69.

“These distant observations of KBOs are already showing us they are a very heterogeneous population,” says Stern. “They have different numbers of satel-lites, surface properties, rotation peri-ods and shapes, and we are measuring all this.”

New Horizons is funded for an ex-tended mission until May 1, 2021, and Stern says it is almost certain the team will apply for another mission extension after that. For now, though, the group that dazzled the world with its Pluto data is beginning to get ready for the next flyby.

The probe may pass as close as 3,000 km to the object if no obstacles are dis-covered. If something is in the way, the mission will use a backup trajectory that will take it as far out as 20,000 km. The primary trajectory should reveal details as small as 25 m (82 ft.) across, compared to 80 m at Pluto, but

because the KBO is tiny, it will continue to occupy only a few pixels in the imager until flyby day.

That is pretty much what it looks like today in the Hubble Space Telescope imagery the team is using to refine its track on the object’s orbit around the Sun (see inset photo). At Pluto, by com-parison, significant surface details be-gan to resolve months before the flyby.

The New Horizons team will take over optical navigation from Hubble with the spacecraft’s Long-Range Re-connaissance Imager (LORRI) in Sep-tember 2018, refining the commands to take the probe through its prime or backup trajectories.

The spacecraft’s path has been peri-odically adjusted with propulsion burns as it approaches the target KBO, with the next opportunity due on May 25. Af-ter its summer in hibernation and Sep-tember awakening, it will sleep again until May 2018.

At that point, it will awaken to begin preparations for the flyby. Full-scale operations will start in July 2018, as

it homes in on its target. LORRI will scan the path ahead for obstacles, and the instruments will begin focusing on the target. By then the KBO will have a name, selected in a contest NASA plans to kick off this fall, instead of the cur-rent alphanumeric designation.

The flyby itself will come on Dec. 31, 2019, controlled at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Columbia, Maryland, where the mission team also gathered for the Pluto flyby.

“On flyby day, we will swoop right down and study the surface geology, the surface composition,” says Stern. “We will map both of those. We’ll look for a coma—an atmosphere—and any other signs of active processes that are going on. We’ll search for satellites. If there are satellites, we’ll map them as well.”

As with Pluto, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) will ping MU69 with radio signals after New Horizons passes by for bistatic radar-occultation mea-surements of any atmosphere that may be present. The target’s greater range and smaller size present new challenges for DNS operators and the New Hori-zons Radio Experiment scientists.

“In the case of Pluto, the field of view of the radio instrument was just on a portion, because it was so large in the sky from our position,” Stern says. “This time, the target is smaller than the field of view, so we get a whole-body measurement. And because it is smaller the signal is weaker, but all the predic-tion calculations show that we ought to be able to get this and compare it to asteroids and comets and other small

bodies in the inner Solar System.”A decade ago, New Horizons teamed

with Europe’s Rosetta comet-landing mission for a joint study of Jupiter as the two probes flew through the gas gi-ant’s neighborhood. Ultimately, Rosetta provided unprecedented imagery and other data on the comet 67P/Churyu-mov-Gerasimenko, another icy body that originated in the Kuiper Belt.

Unlike the comet, MU69 has been in place since the early days of the Solar System, unchanged by a close passage to the Sun. That “pristine” condition should hold clues to the formation of the larger bodies in the Solar System and, by extension, to the formation of exoplanets that orbit stars with similar belts of smaller bodies.

“All the small KBOs are the building blocks of the dwarf planets but also the giant planets,” says Stern. “It is so cold out there that it’s essentially a deep freeze. It’s like an archaeological dig in the origin of the Solar System because everything is just frozen.”

It took about 4.5 hr. for New Horizons data, traveling at the speed of light, to reach the DSN from the vicinity of Pluto. Now, with another billion miles traveled, it will take 6 hr., Stern says. As with Pluto, the team will not know for sure if New Horizons survived the en-counter until the first signals are routed from the DSN antennas into the control center at APL. If it does, the imagery and other data will be trickling in for almost two years after that.

“It might look like a comet or an as-teroid, but every time we go to a new class of object we find ourselves scratch-ing our heads,” Stern says. “New Hori-zons is not only going to do a flyby of a new class of object with MU69, but also the farthest flyby, the farthest explora-tion, in the history of humankind.” c

The New Horizons Pluto probe is on the way to a flyby of its second Kui-per Belt Object in 2019. The Hubble is tracking the tiny object (inset).

NASA, ESA, SWRI, JHU/APL, NEW HORIZONS KBO RESEARCH TEAM

AviationWeek.com/awst AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/MAY 15-28, 2017 23

AIR

BU

S

Graham Warwick Dallas

Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed push to break into the commercial unmanned-aircraft market

M ajor aerospace companies are bidding for a stake in the growing commercial unmanned aircraft mar-ket, but rather than developing new vehicles they

are targeting the business of providing services to large customers.

Airbus has formed a U.S.-based company called Air-bus Aerial to bring together commercial satellite and un-manned–aircraft remote-sensing capabilities to provide data collection and image-processing services to large and global enterprises.

A year after forming a commer-cial business unit, Boeing’s subsid-iary Insitu has unveiled a revamped suite of products and services aimed at large customers that includes the parent company’s satellite-imaging and unmanned surface and subsur-face vehicle capabilities.

Lockheed Martin is developing an inspection services business built around a commercial version of the Stalker XE small military un-manned aircraft system (UAS) and focused on linear inspection of pipe-lines, power lines and rail tracks as well as environmental monitoring.

General Atomics Aeronautics Systems, meanwhile, is assessing the commercial market as it develops a type-certifiable version of the Predator B medium-altitude, long-endurance UAS called the SkyGuard-ian. Small military UAS producer AeroVironment will begin selling a small commercial drone, Quantix, and data analytics to the agricultural market later this year. Large UAS maker Northrop Grumman, meanwhile, says it has no interest in the commercial market.

Airbus is seeking to gain traction in an unmanned-air-craft market where it has struggled to establish a foothold because of a fragmented European defense market. The others are looking for a way to expand out of a defense market that has slowed in the U.S. as industry waits for the Pentagon to launch development of the next generation of military UAS.

Airbus, Insitu and Lockheed all say they are targeting a commercial market where large customers are seeking con-sistently safe and high-quality data services, often globally. AeroVironment is starting in the U.S. but plans to sell its Quantix drone and analytics tools internationally

While there are already many competing providers of ei-ther satellite imagery or UAS services, Airbus Aerial’s mis-sion “is to bring all the different layers together,” says Jesse Kallman, president of the new Atlanta-based company.

With bases both in the U.S. and Europe, Airbus Aerial’s initial focus is on developing new imagery services using information provided by drones, satellites, high-altitude air-craft and other sources. These could include Airbus’s Zephyr high-altitude, long-endurance “pseudo-satellite” UAS.

Insitu’s Inexa Solutions brings together the company’s ScanEagle and Integrator small long-endurance UAS, its Inexa Control commercial ground control station, the Vi-dar maritime surface-search payload developed by Hood Technologies and Sentient Vision Systems, and Logos Technologies’ Redkite wide-area motion-imagery sensor, plus software tools for video processing, exploitation and dissemination.

When Insitu formed its commercial division a year ago, “we didn’t really know” what the business was going to be, says Jon Damush, vice president and general manager of Insitu Commercial. “What we did know was we had a capa-

bility set that we refer to as ‘from glass to glass,’ from the sensors all the way through the data collection, transmission, processing, analytics and dissemination chain,” he says.

“What we didn’t know was where the value proposition was for the application of that technology and expertise in the commercial market, and what we have been able to gain over the past year through engagement with partners/customers is an understanding of their business, and where the challenges and opportunities for efficiencies are,” says Damush.

“And that solution in many cases does not involve the sale of a ScanEagle. It might involve the use of a ScanEagle, it might not, but the point is we bring an aerial-remote-sens-ing expertise to that customer set,” he says. The company has already partnered with PrecisionHawk in using small UAS for precision agriculture, a market Insitu did not ad-dress, he adds.

Development of the new commercial offering has primar-ily been driven by the needs of large and often global en-terprises. “They have the scale and scope of problems that our capability set and expertise help solve, says Damush.

UNMANNED AVIATION

Drone Play

Airbus Aerial will bring together satellite imaging with data from

different classes of UAS.