Another persistant solar platform Solara 50 and 60

Picking up from where the abandoned Qinetiq Zephyr left off New Mexico based Titan Aerospace is working on a persistant platform.

They have certainly been busy in the graphics generating department. Staying aloft at high altitude obviously carries huge advantages. Less take off and landings, less chance of incident. Flying above weather and commercial airliners the platforms would be free to roam.

If the Solara 60 manages to loft a 100kg payload it will be a very useful system indeed. Its Global Hawk territory at this payload size with obviously much more data per single sortie. The five year flight slot might represent the time it takes for new sensors to mature and make the current ones obsolete.

Plodding around gathering data across multiple sensors the operator could sell chunks of data to whoever needed it. The end user might book a slot for an area of interest as the platform flies over. Of course anything being built or other changes could be pulled from the data at a later date.

Very little to be found out about the systems here http://titanaerospace.com/

There was a great deal of pride at Farnborough 2010, not only did European sUAS operators fly during the show but the Zephyr smashed all previous endurance records.