8 What potential enhancements to future ATM development efforts can be recommended to acquire data concerning future reported UAPs to assist in the effort to better understand the nature and origin of the UAPs?
FINDING
NASA's strong partnership with the FAA will be pivotal to designing future air traffic management systems to acquire UAP data.
NASA's deep experience in researching and developing air traffic management tools, together with its strong partnership with the FAA, will be pivotal to designing future ATM systems to acquire UAP data. At present, surveillance instruments are not designed to detect anomalous objects, and associated metadata are often absent. NASA should begin by developing new concepts and ideas for ATM systems, which enable these systems to assist in the effort to better understand UAP.
NASA should leverage its expertise by reviewing and demonstrating passive sensing techniques. NASA should also consider platforms that include new types of data such as imaging data and even multispectral or hyperspectral data. In turn, NASA could conduct research to see whether machine learning algorithms could be incorporated into future ATM systems to detect and analyze UAP in real-time. This research would represent a complex undertaking whose outcome could allow for substantial and systematic gathering UAP data as well as a robust characterization of the background. Once again, NASA's experience and expertise in these areas would allow it to provide critical assistance in identifying and evaluating new safety systems.
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