Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have evolved rapidly over the past decade driven primarily by military uses, and have begun finding application among civilian users for earth sensing reconnaissance and scientific data collection purposes. Among UAS, promising characteristics are long flight duration, improved mission safety, flight repeatability due to improving autopilots, and reduced operational costs when compared to manned aircraft. The potential advantages of an unmanned platform, however, depend on many factors, such as aircraft, sensor types, mission objectives, and the current UAS regulatory requirements for operations of the particular platform. The regulations concerning UAS operation are still in the early development stages and currently present significant barriers to entry for scientific users. In this article we describe a variety of platforms, as well as sensor capabilities, and identify advantages of each as relevant to the demands of users in the scientific research sector. We also briefly discuss the current state of regulations affecting UAS operations, with the purpose of informing the scientific community about this developing technology whose potential for revolutionizing natural science observations is similar to those transformations that GIS and GPS brought to the community two decades ago.

Between 2006 and 2010, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the US Forest Service flew 14 unmanned airborne system (UAS) sensor missions, over 57 fires in the western US. The missions demonstrated the capabilities of a UAS platform (NASA Ikhana UAS), a multispectral sensor (autonomous modular sensor (AMS)), onboard processing and data visualization (Wildfire Collaborative Decision Environment (W-CDE)), to provide fire intelligence to management teams. Autonomous, on-board processing of the AMS sensor data allowed real-time fire product delivery to incident management teams on the wildfire events. The fire products included geo-rectified, colour-composite quick-look imagery, fire detection shape files, post-fire real-time normalized burn ratio imagery and burn area emergency response (BAER) imagery. The W-CDE was developed to allow the ingestion and visualization of AMS data and other pertinent fire-related information layers. This article highlights the technologies developed and employed, the UAS wildfire imaging missions performed and the outcomes and findings of the multi-year efforts.