Smoke Scout - The fun part

I see two really fun parts about Smoke Scout. First, this is an interesting design challenge. The Smoke Scout UAV needs to have large enough surface area on the wings to collect solar energy to keep aloft day and night.  The UAV will also need to have a payload capacity of about a hundred pounds, almost all of which will be used to carry the fire sensing optics. The UAV also needs to be durable and not require frequent maintenance.

The other thing I find fun about this idea is the image processing and sensor development. The better job you do at image processing, the less optics you need, which saves weight and cost. So, building prototypes and spending a while getting the image processing close to perfect would pay for itself many times over later.