Aurora Preps for Greenhouse Monitoring Mission With FOCAL

Photo Courtesy Aurora Flight Sciences

By Holly Gonzalez 



In preparation for a deployment to Alaska later this year to study greenhouse gas emissions, Aurora Flight Sciences has integrated an advanced measuring system on its optionally manned Centaur aircraft, obtained a Federal Aviation Administration airworthiness certification and performed initial flight tests over the Chesapeake Bay.



The new measuring system, named FOCAL, is a collaboration a between Harvard University’s Anderson Research Group, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Turbulence and Diffusion Division and Aurora.



FOCAL, which stands for Flux Observations of Carbon from an Airborne Laboratory, uses “lasers, detector technology and ultrasensitive spectroscopy” to retrieve measurements over vast amounts of Arctic terrain when flown on the Centaur.



"Global environmental change represents a major threat to both our national security and our world economy," says John Langford, Aurora's CEO. "Aurora Flight Sciences was founded to provide UAVs to the science community for global environmental monitoring, and we are thrilled to be working with our original customer, Harvard's Anderson Research Group, on this fundamental research."



FOCAL is able to distinguish between thermogenic sources of carbon and biogenic sources of carbon and will continue to monitor the expelling of methane and carbon dioxide that warm the world. 



The system is to fly over Alaska’s Northern Slope later this year, and data from the National Science Foundation-sponsored program will be shared with the oceanic and atmospheric science communities that monitor rapid environmental changes in the Arctic region.