QinetiQ A British company is hoping that the Zephyr, a solar-powered drone, can stay aloft above the Army’s Yuma Proving Ground until Friday.
This month we reported on the flight of the Solar Impulse, an experimental aircraft that broke the world record for continuous solar-powered manned flight by staying aloft for 26 straight hours.
But the Solar Impulse is not the only solar aircraft breaking records. For more than a week, the Zephyr, a solar-powered drone, has been circling high above the Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.
QinetiQ, a British defense technology company, developed the craft, which could have broad military and commercial surveillance applications. “The plan is for it to stay airborne until this Friday,” said Douglas Millard, a QinetiQ spokesman. “At that point it will have been in the air for two weeks.”
If the Zephyr can safely return to Earth at that point, it will have smashed the official world record for continuous unmanned flight, now held by Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk drone. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, a governing body for aeronautic world records, is observing the flight.
The goal for the project has been to establish the Zephyr as the “world’s first truly eternal plane,” with future designs of the drone expected to provide “low-cost, persistent surveillance capability over months rather than days,” a company statement said. Both the British Defense Ministry and the Pentagon are involved with the development of the drone.
With a 74-foot wingspan, the craft weighs just 110 pounds and is launched by hand. Its lithium-sulfur batteries, supplied by Sion Power, are powered by paper-thin sheets of silicon solar arrays. With a high power-to-weight ratio, the aircraft has already demonstrated a payload capacity able to meet surveillance and communication needs, a QinetiQ statement said.
QinetiQ and its subsidiaries are leading developers of militarized robots, including the Talon robot, which is used for roadside bomb disposal in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Maars robot, one of the first robots designed to have lethal capabilities on the battlefield.