The first of two former Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned surveillance aircraft converted for environmental science research for NASA made its maiden voyage, a four-hour checkout flight, on Oct. 23 over the skies of NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in southern California. “This is the future,” said Paul Newman, a NASA project scientist, in a Northrop release that same day. He added, “We are taking the first steps into making scientific measurements with an unmanned system—a hybrid of a satellite and an aircraft.” NASA plans its first RQ-4 mission early next year called Global Hawk Pacific, or “GloPac.” One of the air vehicles will be fitted with 11 scientific instruments to collect atmospheric data while flying through the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere and validate data from NASA’s AURA science satellite.
The Pentagon fulfilled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's promise to slash the number of Religious Affiliation Codes used by the military to track the volume of members adhering to different religions and to shape the chaplain corps to support them. The change reduces the number of religions counted for such purposes…