Windracers Announces Latest Contract “to Provide NORCE with ULTRA Autonomous Cargo Aircraft for Antarctic Missions”

UK-based Win­drac­ers, the devel­op­er of a low-cost autonomous car­go air­craft named ULTRA, announced this week it has giv­en NORCE, an inde­pen­dent sci­en­tif­ic research insti­tute based in Nor­way, two ULTRAs for use in sci­en­tif­ic sur­vey mis­sions of the Antarc­tic.

The craft will sup­port Troll Observ­ing Net­work (TONe), a state-of-the-art, mul­ti-plat­form, mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary dis­trib­uted obser­va­tion net­work, to be estab­lished on and around the Nor­we­gian research sta­tion Troll, in Dron­ning Maud Land, one of the most data-poor areas in Antarc­ti­ca. 

TONe is to strength­en Nor­way’s Antarc­tic research and mon­i­tor­ing capa­bil­i­ty by giv­ing Nor­we­gian and inter­na­tion­al researchers access to obser­va­tion­al data as a basis for new knowl­edge.

Simon Mud­er­ack, CEO of Win­drac­ers, explained, “NORCE is to employ two ULTRAs to help car­ry out an impor­tant envi­ron­men­tal mis­sion, name­ly, to gain a com­pre­hen­sive under­stand­ing of the phys­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal, chem­i­cal and geo­log­i­cal process­es present­ly tak­ing place in Antarc­ti­ca.”

He con­tin­ued, “The ULTRA is unique­ly suit­ed to sup­port NORCE after its mul­ti-mis­sion capa­bil­i­ty and Antarc­tic mis­sion expe­ri­ence in Jan­u­ary. The Win­drac­ers team looks for­ward to a grow­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion to deliv­er a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the region.”

Rune Stor­vold, Senior VP of NORCE’s Observ­ing Sys­tems, remarked, “One of the rea­sons why NORCE has cho­sen the Win­drac­ers ULTRA is because of the company’s proven abil­i­ty to suc­cess­ful­ly com­plete mis­sions in the extreme con­di­tions of Antarc­ti­ca. This is part of a UK200 mil­lion upgrade with a new Troll research sta­tion that includes a renew­able ener­gy sys­tem, eight sci­ence obser­va­to­ries and a drone ser­vice based on the ULTRA, which allows us to car­ry a com­pre­hen­sive opti­cal and radar pay­load, cov­er­ing the region from the near­by ocean to the Antarc­tic Plateau.”

The release states, “Spe­cial­is­ing in oper­a­tions in the Arc­tic and Antarc­tic, NORCE devel­ops sen­sors and inte­grates these into plat­forms such as the ULTRA for data analy­sis and real-time mon­i­tor­ing, data col­lec­tion, analy­sis dis­tri­b­u­tion and visu­al­i­sa­tion.”

This air­craft is a heavy-lift, long dis­tance autonomous car­go plane with a pay­load of up to 100kg and a range of close to 1,000km. ULTRA is to return to the Antarc­tic after fly­ing 3,000 km dur­ing 25 sci­en­tif­ic sur­vey flights, ful­ly-autonomous­ly and Beyond Visu­al Line of Sight (BVLOS), util­is­ing satel­lite com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the British Antarc­tic Sur­vey in Jan­u­ary 2024.

Watch Video: “Stun­ning Footage of Win­drac­ers Autonomous Air­craft Fly­ing over Antarc­ti­ca”

Back­ground

NORCE is an inde­pen­dent research insti­tute which con­ducts research for both pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors, to facil­i­tate informed and sus­tain­able choic­es for the future. This cov­ers inno­va­tion in ener­gy, health care, cli­mate, the envi­ron­ment, soci­ety and tech­nol­o­gy. The company’s solu­tions address key chal­lenges for soci­ety and con­tribute to val­ue cre­ation on the local, nation­al and glob­al lev­els.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://windracers.com/

https://www.norceresearch.no/en

(Images: Win­drac­ers)

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