NASA’s G-IV aircraft flew its first mission to test this navigational system from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, in December
8 min readThe G-IV aircraft flies overhead in the Mojave Desert near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Baseline flights like this one occurred in June 2024, and future flights in service of science research will benefit from the installment of the Soxnav navigational system, developed in collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in California’s Silicon Valley.
“The objective was to demonstrate this new system can keep a high-speed aircraft within just a few feet of its target track, and to keep it there better than 90% of the time,” said John Sonntag, BAERI independent consultant co-developer of Soxnav. “The G-IV is currently equipped with a standard autopilot system,” said Joe Piotrowski Jr., operations engineer for the G-IV. “But Soxnav will be able to create the exact level flight required for Next Generation Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (
“With the data that can be collected from science flights equipped with the Soxnav instrument, NASA can provide the general public with better support for natural disasters, tracking of food and water supplies, as well as general Earth data about how the environment is changing,” Piotrowski said.
Armstrong Flight Research Center B200 Earth Science Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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