High Speed UAV Air Sampling of Environmental Contaminants

Collecting air samples is not as easy as it looks. Even as we watched the Stardust NASA mission, which collected samples coming from the Comet we realize that they themselves did not know it would actually work. Thankfully the men and women scientists had a successful mission in their collection of these samples. The use of aerogel was excellently used to catch the particles, which were moving at very high rates of speed.

I propose using a similar process here on earth using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAVs to collect the particulate in our own atmosphere for environmental study. Here is how it would work. The UAV would have a fuselage with 200 little 8-sided wheels along it. These wheels would spin outward into the relative airflows every three seconds to collect the particulate. On the arm of each of the 8 wheels would be a piece of aerogel.

Each spin of the 8-wheeled system would be mechanized by computer and recorded by satellite its exact position, so we know where the particulate came from. This data would be fed into a super computer upon landing of the UAV.The Unmanned Aerial vehicles would fly together in threes at altitudes no more than 1500 abreast and 1500 in altitude in a straight line. Then turn and offset them selves from the last pass by the width of a future complete pass and go back. By doing this they would not upset the air or the particle flow in the air of the nearest aerial artificial collection grid pat.

Consider all this in 2006.

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By: Lance Winslow