Update: Now U.S Airforce's Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(Global Hawk) helps Fukushima Nuclear Plant

It seems the article that I posted March 17 got many hits from the visitors of my blog.
http://myprojectatdc.blogspot.com/2011/03/now-us-airforces-unmanned-aerial.html

So, here is the update.
It seems that Global Hawk flew over the Fukushima nuclear powr plant couple of times at the beginning of the Fukushima Nuclear Powerplant outage.


But it seems they figured what the most useful in this situation is not a Global Hawk, but T-Hawk, which is the Unmannned  Helicopter.



Yesterday,June 24, this T Hawk fell over to the roof of Daini (No.2) nuclear reactor, since it became uncontrollable from remote locations.

Now U.S Airforce's Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(Global Hawk) helps Fukushima Nuclear Plant

Due to the high radiation, onsite engineers are not able to close the failities.
More worse, nobody in war-room for remedy action can see what exactly the status of each reactor is.

Then, Japanese Government asked US Air force to send Global Hawk(UAV) to take pictures of the facities so that engineers can see and understand the exact conditions of the facility. (although they are still monitoring various figures at various points, those information has its limitation to know the actual situation.)

NHK news reported that this US airplane would be onsite from March 17 and work from March 18.

*****Update April 1, 2010
It seems that the pictures taken from this airplane are given to the Japanese Government. I don't know why. I think the most party in need to see the pictures is TEPCO people. As of today, none of those pictures are disclosed to the public.
Is this because U.S does not want to disclose the pictures that may reveal how much in detail the airplane can shoot in picture?