U.S. Navy’s Solar Drone Will Fly 90-Day Missions Seeing All With Palantir Technology

The U.S. Navy is developing an uncrewed, solar-powered aircraft known as Skydweller that is designed to remain airborne for 90 days at a stretch. It was revealed Thursday that the drone will be equipped with state-of-the-art analytics from Palantir Technologies to rapidly process the vast amounts of data it collects literally on the fly. The aircraft, being developed by U.S.-Spanish company Skydweller Aero, will be provide the capability to persistently watch wide expanses of oceans as never before.

The idea of an ‘eternal aircraft’ that uses sun power by day and batteries by night has been around for more than 20 years. NASA’s giant HELIOS prototype flew to over 90,000 feet in 2001, but, like most subsequent solar aircraft, it was comparatively fragile and broke up in flight in 2007. This fragility has been a running problem in solar aircraft development and has repeatedly led to programs being delayed or cancelled, notably Google’s Solara 50, which crashed in 2015, and Facebook’s Aquila, which suffered the same fate 2016.

However, Skydweller comes from more robust and proven stock, as it is based on the crewed Solar Impulse 2 aircraft, which flew around the world in stages in 2016. The current Skydweller prototype is the Solar Impulse 2 airframe, which has been modified for uncrewed operation.