EDWARDS, Calif. – NASA is putting the drones to work.

The aircraft range from solar-powered flying wings larger than a Boeing 747 to civilian versions of conventionally fueled planes already used for military reconnaissance work in the Balkans and elsewhere.

NASA’s Office of Earth Science recently announced it has selected 11 projects for further study that propose to use these uninhabited aerial vehicles, or UAVs, to do everything from monitor hurricanes to coordinate relief efforts in areas wracked by natural calamities.

The 11 proposals, culled from 45 submitted last fall, will be further refined over the next three months. NASA will then select two or three for full development sometime in early 2001.

"Whether it’s monitoring the ripeness of the coffee crop in Hawaii, clouds and their effects on our global temperatures or seeking the mysteries of hurricanes and their deadly powers, these unique vehicles will explore our planet’s horizons in unprecedented detail," said Ghassem Asrar, NASA’s associate administrator for Earth science, in a statement.

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Unlike traditional aircraft, these drones can stay aloft for days, weeks, even months at a time.

Professor Stanley Herwitz, of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., proposes using the Pathfinder-Plus aircraft to monitor large scale mechanically harvested coffee plantations in places like Hawaii.

Send In the Drones

The 11 projects involve the use of five different UAVs, including: Pathfinder-Plus: Built by AeroVironment – the folks who gave the world the first effective human- and solar-powered airplanes – this propeller-driven, solar-powered flying wing set a world altitude record in 1998, soaring to 80,000 feet (24,000 meters).

Helios Prototype: The Helios, also built by AeroVironment, is evolved from the smaller Pathfinder. NASA hopes Helios will soar to 100,000 feet (30,000 meters) next summer, besting Pathfinder’s record.

Altus II: Built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., this drone owes much of its technology to military planes like the Predator, which has been deployed in combat on at least five occasions. Proposals under the program also seek to use the Vindicator and Aerosonde UAVs.

The plane, armed with a high-resolution camera, could circle high over the plantations, tracking the fields as they ripen.

"You'd want it lingering there and providing the imagery on a daily basis during the harvest season," Herwitz said.

By using the data to pinpoint precisely where and when the coffee cherries reach their ideal ripeness, growers can then dispatch their mechanical harvesters to optimize yields - and profits.

And while balloons or satellites can theoretically do similar work, these advanced aircraft can do them one better, lingering over any one particular spot only to then quickly zip to another.

"It can hover and then travel up and down the East Coast, monitoring normal weather and looking for serious weather and then vector right to it," said Al Gasiewski of the Pathfinder.

Gasiewski, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Environmental Technology Laboratory, proposes using the plane to both monitor weather and provide reconnaissance of areas beset by natural calamity.

Proposed along with NASA and the State Department's Global Disaster Information Network, the Peacewing project could dispatch the plane to assess damages and help coordinate relief efforts, Gasiewski said.

"We’d get to home in on the important action," he said.

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That makes them ideal for studying atmospheric chemistry, or weather phenomena such as hurricanes or thunderstorms, as the bulk of the proposals seek to do.

Christopher Webster, an atmospheric chemist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said he wants to use both Helios and Pathfinder to study how the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere exchange water. That work could lead to a better understanding of how the presence of even minute quantities of water high in the atmosphere can impact the Earth’s climate.

By flying the planes back and forth across the tropopause boundary, his project could shed light on those exchange mechanisms.

"We need to go to 60,000 feet [18,288 meters] and higher and we need to make measurements of the concentrations of the water as vertical profiles," Webster said.

NASA foresees the day when the planes will fill a niche other aerial platforms cannot.