NASA and its partners have recently tested an aircraft orientation system that could help the planes maintain a specific course even by stealing at high speeds up to 500 MPH. The instrument is SOXNAV, the culmination of more than 30 years of development of airplane navigation systems.
NASA G-IV planes carried out its first mission to test this NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center navigation system in Edwards, California, in December 2024. Environmental research institute (Baeri) in Silicon Valley in California.
“The objective was to demonstrate that this new system can keep an airplane at high speed a few meters from its target track, and to keep it better than 90% of the time,” said John Sonntag, independent co-develover of Baeri de Baeri Soxnav.
With 3D automated steering board, SOXNAV provides drivers with precision approach to land in poor visibility. Previous generations of navigation systems have put the technical basic line of modern, compact and automated iteration of Soxnav.
“The G-IV is currently equipped with a standard automatic pilot system,” said Joe Piotrowski Jr., operations engineer for the G-IV. “But Soxnav will be able to create the flight of exact function required for the new generation airborne synthetic opening radar (Airsar-ng) Success of the mission. »»
Guided by Soxnav, the G-IV may be able to provide better, more abundant and less expensive scientific information. For example, the navigation tool optimizes observations by Airsar-Ng, an instrument that uses three radars simultaneously to observe subtle changes in the surface of the earth. With the SOXNAV system, these three radars provide improved and more precise data on earth science.
“With data that can be collected from scientific flights equipped with the SOXNAV instrument, NASA can provide the general public with great support for natural disasters, monitoring of food and water supplies, as well as general data on the Earth on how the environment changes, “Piotrowski said.
In the end, this economic flight guide system is intended to be used by a variety of types of aircraft and to support a variety of current and future airborne sensors. “The SOXNAV system is important for all NASA air scientific platforms,” said Fran Becker, project manager for the G-IV AIRSAR-NG project at NASA Armstrong. “The intention is that the system is used by any airborne scientific platform and satisfy the objectives of data collection of each mission.”
In conjunction with other instruments equipped with the fleet of airborne scientific aircraft, SOXNAV facilitates the generation of more abundant and better quality scientific data on planet Earth. Extreme meteorological events becoming more and more common, quality science data can Improve our understanding From our original planet to meet the challenges we face today and to prepare for future weather events.
“SOXNAV allows better data collection for people who can use this information to protect and improve the life of future generations,” said Sonntag.