It’s a whale, it’s a boat, it’s a saildrone! Saildrone is a United States based company that designs, manufactures, and plans missions for a fleet of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). Saildrone USVs are used to collect data for metrological and oceanographic research and provide maritime domain awareness with payloads of specialized instruments. Powered by wind and solar power, these vehicles are uniquely designed to have long voyages, up to 12 months, collecting and transmitting various types of data in real-time.
Saildrone USVs are not small in size, as some may think, but resemble a sailboat in shape and move efficiently through the water. They vary in size, as models can range from 23 feet long with a 15-foot wing to 65 feet long with a 40-foot wing height. They are built to withstand the open ocean with harsh conditions while taking accurate measurements for scientific research.
In 2022, Saildrone was looking for a way to estimate power consumption for their Saildrone Explorer-class USVs, which are powered entirely by solar and wind energy. They needed to ensure that the drone had enough power for the instruments for its mission. They began using the hourly solar data provided by NASA’s Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) project to estimate the amount of power generated by solar panels on their drones.
Saildrone engineers use POWER's historical oceanic solar irradiance data to compute how much electricity a drone’s solar panel can generate for a proposed path. Using this information, they determine the viable operating season and optimize their instrument payload for the time of year and the area of operation. This analysis allows Saildrone to properly plan and estimate costs for future missions, even planning to have many USVs deployed at any given moment and operate in areas and seasons with less sun and wind. According to Saildrone, the data leveraged from POWER “enables good decision-making. For instance, we might declare whether the mission is feasible or not or take the time to integrate additional solar panels or reduce power consumption.” In this way, POWER plays a critical role for Saildrone in mission planning and making strategic engineering tradeoff decisions.
The missions Saildrone conducts vary from better collecting weather data, to mapping the seafloor, to helping strengthen the maritime defense of U.S. assets through surveillance, intelligence gathering, and reconnaissance. An example of a mission that POWER data supported was in the Gulf Stream in 2022. The Gulf Stream is known for producing intense storms and making the weather in Europe warmer than without it, and the study aimed to research the air-sea exchange of carbon. This is the process by which carbon dioxide moves between the atmosphere and the ocean’s surface.
Another Saildrone mission supported by POWER data was off the shore of San Francisco with Bat Conservation International, an organization dedicated to ending the extinction of bats across the globe. They were able to record bats using an ultrasonic microphone that was mounted to a Saildrone Explorer USV. During this mission, fog affected solar power generation. In both missions, energy generation prediction and consumption planning using POWER data was critical in ensuring research was uninterrupted despite adverse weather conditions.
Due to POWER’s global availability and hourly historical solar data, a unique company like Saildrone can plan missions with efficiency and reliability. NASA supports many projects, companies, and agencies across the world with its data. Maybe if you look close enough the next time you find yourself at a beach or on the coast, you’ll be able to spot a Saildrone USV, knowing NASA POWER helps to planits missions.