Deployable Lightweight Upper Air Sensing System

ABSTRACT: The Rotosonde, A low SWAP coaxial UAS system, is proposed to fill the existing need in meteorological data collection in the lower 15,000 of the atmosphere.Current profiling systems are bulky, slow, and not re-usable.The proposed system is highly portable, fast, and recoverable/re-usable while providing a means to gather measurements of pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed, and wind direction as a function of altitude.Due to rotor downwash flow interaction, wind speed and direction are not directly measured but instead are estimated using a correlation algorithm on the vehicle state information.; BENEFIT: The proposed system will provide military benefit to applications requiring knowledge of atmospheric parameters.This includes resupply airdrops, calculated aerial release points, ballistics trajectory and guidance systems, close proximity flight missions, or mission feasibility analysis.Commercially, the proposed system is marketable to areas including wind energy evaluation, civil aviation, environmental research, and disaster/emergency response organizations.