Aquila Internet Drone

Flyaway

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Facebook launches Aquila solar-powered drone for internet access. Looking at it, I have to wonder how many UFO reports it will trigger. ;)

Facebook has revealed its first full-scale drone, which it plans to use to provide internet access in remote parts of the world.

Code-named “Aquila”, the solar-powered drone will be able to fly without landing for three months at a time, using a laser to beam data to a base station on the ground.

The company plans to use a linked network of the drones to provide internet access to large rural areas. However, as with its Internet.org project, Facebook will not be dealing with customers directly, instead partnering with local ISPs to offer the services.

Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice-president of engineering, said: “Our mission is to connect everybody in the world. This is going to be a great opportunity for us to motivate the industry to move faster on this technology.”

Facebook said it would test the aircraft, which has the wingspan of a Boeing 737, in the US later this year.

Yael Maguire, the company’s engineering director of connectivity, said that the plane will operate between 60,000ft (18km) and 90,000ft (27km) – above the altitude of commercial airplanes – so it would not be affected by weather.

It will climb to its maximum height during the day, before gliding slowly down to its lowest ebb at night, to conserve power when its solar panels are not receiving charge.

Article includes promo video.

 
The real takeaway is 10Gbps COTS air-to-air lasercomm for aircraft will appear, possibly air-to-ground. If the ground link is lasercomm as well as RF, things are certainly interesting, but satellite lasercomm is approaching COTS now as well. While the pointing requirements are harsh, if Facebook efforts to build out global satellite comms coverage is real with a LEO constellation, some satellite links may be of the laser variety as well. We are already achieving 1Gbps lasercomm from ISS and the moon.
 
 
;D

Aquila’s First Flight: A Big Milestone Toward Connecting Billions of People

Internet access can offer life-changing opportunities and experiences to all of us, but there are still 4 billion people without it. That’s 60% of the global population. As many as 1.6 billion of those unconnected people live in remote locations with no access to mobile broadband networks, where implementing existing network technologies is so challenging and costly that it will take years to bring everyone affordable access. As part of our commitment to Internet.org, we formed the Facebook Connectivity Lab to build new technologies — including aircraft, satellites, and wireless communications systems — to help solve this problem more quickly.

Today Connectivity Lab announced a big milestone in this work: the first full-scale test flight of Aquila, our high-altitude unmanned aircraft. Aquila is a solar-powered airplane that can be used to bring affordable internet to hundreds of millions of people in the hardest-to-reach places. When complete, Aquila will be able to circle a region up to 60 miles in diameter, beaming connectivity down from an altitude of more than 60,000 feet using laser communications and millimeter wave systems. Aquila is designed to be hyper efficient, so it can fly for up to three months at a time. The aircraft has the wingspan of an airliner, but at cruising speed it will consume only 5,000 watts — the same amount as three hair dryers, or a high-end microwave.

We’ve been flying a one-fifth scale version of Aquila for several months, but this was the first time we’ve flown the full-scale aircraft. This test flight was designed to verify our operational models and overall aircraft design. To prove out the full capacity of the design, we will push Aquila to the limits in a lengthy series of tests in the coming months and years. Failures are expected and sometimes even planned; we learn more when we push the plane to the brink.

This first functional check was a low-altitude flight, and it was so successful that we ended up flying Aquila for more than 90 minutes — three times longer than originally planned. We were able to verify several performance models and components, including aerodynamics, batteries, control systems, and crew training. In our next tests, we will fly Aquila faster, higher and longer, eventually taking it above 60,000 feet. Each test will help us learn and move faster toward our goal.

We’re encouraged by this first successful flight, but we have a lot of work ahead of us. In fact, to reach our goal of being able to fly over a remote region and deliver connectivity for up to three months at time, we will need to break the world record for solar-powered unmanned flight, which currently stands at two weeks. This will require significant advancements in science and engineering to achieve. It will also require us to work closely with operators, governments and other partners to deploy these aircraft in the regions where they’ll be most effective.

But we believe this work has never been more important. New technologies like Aquila have the potential to bring access, voice and opportunity to billions of people around the world, and do so faster and more cost-effectively than has ever been possible before.

 

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VTOLicious said:
::) how does it land?

Carefully, with feeling?

Seriously, styrofoam skids it seems, but it sounds like they had partial structural failure during landing (but not the actual landing?) so it still looks like these HALE rigs are still so fragile a fart would knock them out.
 
"The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident as follows:
a structural failure of the wing as a result of exceeding the airspeed envelope due to wind gusts which were beyond the capabilities of the autopilot. Contributing to the accident was an insufficient amount of drag to track the glideslope in the presence of atmospheric disturbances."

http://www.ntsb.gov/_layouts/ntsb.aviation/brief.aspx?ev_id=20160701X62525&key=1
 
The fact they had a separate team monitoring wind to formulate a landing plan shows how fragile these HALE UAV's still are.

I love the out of box thinking on a lot of their work though. The bright park to use fluorescing fiber optic in a flower/hemisphere shape to make a near-omnidirectional laser receiver to avoid the need of an actively stabilized receiver telescope was genius.
 
Project has been cancelled. From late last month: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44624702
 
Looks like Facebook is concentrating it's efforts on an Internet satellite program now, called Athena:


Earlier story from May of this year: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk...e-secret-plans-to-launch-a-internet-satellite
 

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