NASA RFI: Earth Sciences Advanced Missions Platform Research Aircraft (SpaceRef)

NASA/DFRC anticipates a requirement to use a high altitude, long endurance manned aircraft as an Advanced Missions Platform (AMP) to carry earth science sensor payloads to areas world-wide by the fourth quarter of FY 2008. The payloads themselves would be designed to automatically determine optimum flight trajectories based on sensor measurements and pass this information to the aircraft's flight