September 3, 2010 | 5:02 PM | By

Global Hawk takes flight

FILED UNDER: Human Impacts, extreme weather, Hurricane Earl, hurricanes, NOAA

NASA/NOAA

A shot of Hurricane Earl's eye from 60,000ft, captured by Global Hawk - an unmanned aircraft that completed its first successful flight through a hurricane on Thursday.

As planned, NASA’s new unmanned hurricane tracking aircraft – Global Hawk – made its first flight into a full-fledged hurricane … and it was a success. The drone spent several hours inside Hurricane Earl yesterday, making at least seven passes through the eye of the storm.

“It was a great flight,” said Scott Braun, a scientist with NASA’s Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes experiment, the goal of which is a better understanding of the development of hurricanes. Referring to Earl, he told OurAmazingPlanet “not only did we catch it intensifying at the early stages, we caught the onset of the weakening, … so we really have described the full evolution of the storm, which is really fantastic.”