A circumnavigation fueled by thermals, sustainable energy, and passion — streaming live science data from 10,000 meters.
No aircraft has ever circumnavigated the globe using only electric propulsion and soaring flight. We rely on thermals, ridge lift, and mountain waves — the same invisible rivers of air that eagles have used for millions of years — combined with a lightweight electric motor for climb-out and safety margins.
The glider carries a suite of research-grade instruments across multiple disciplines: atmospheric chemistry, aerobiology, electromagnetic sensing, microplastic sampling, ionospheric monitoring and more. Data collected across multiple continents and altitudes contributes to ongoing research at partner institutes worldwide.
Every sensor reading, GPS coordinate, and cockpit video frame is transmitted via satellite link and ingested by a cloud-native pipeline — Kubernetes, event streaming, real-time dashboards — so that scientists and the public can watch discovery unfold, live, from the other side of the planet.
Departing from France, the route threads through some of the planet's most spectacular soaring terrain — the Alps, the Himalayan peaks, the Australian Great Dividing Range, and the Andes — before returning home across the North Atlantic.
Every kilogram of the science payload was selected in collaboration with research institutions across four continents, targeting data gaps that can only be filled from a slow-moving, low-altitude platform.
Continuous measurement of CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, and O₃ concentration profiles at sub-100-metre vertical resolution. Data feeds directly into atmospheric reanalysis models at partner meteorological institutes.
Six impaction samplers capture airborne spores, pollen, and microorganisms at different altitudes. Samples are preserved in situ and analysed at landing waypoints to map the aerobiome across biomes and seasons.
A cascade impactor with polycarbonate membranes collects atmospheric microplastic particles from 1 μm to 300 μm across different size classes, contributing to the first global altitude-resolved microplastic dataset.
Ultra-low-frequency magnetic field sensors capture global lightning activity and Schumann resonances. The glider's non-conductive composite airframe provides exceptional shielding from electrical interference.
A dual-frequency GNSS receiver measures ionospheric total electron content variations at high temporal resolution, contributing to space-weather monitoring during the current solar maximum.
Temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind profiling at research grade — equivalent to a radiosonde but with horizontal coverage across thousands of kilometres per flight day, filling gaps in the global weather network.
A longwave infrared camera maps surface thermal emission to identify convective triggers. This data will help validate next-generation numerical weather prediction models for thermal forecasting.
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When the mission is airborne, this section streams live cockpit video and real-time telemetry ingested from the satellite uplink.
AETHER — Adaptive Energy & Thermal Heuristic Engine for Route-planning — is an onboard AI system that processes live weather data, real-time sensor readings and a decade of global soaring records to act as the pilot's second brain. It never commands; it recommends. The final decision always rests with the human at the controls.
AETHER was trained on a corpus of over 4.2 million IGC flight logs from the Open Glider Network — the largest real-world soaring dataset ever assembled — fused with matched NWP reanalysis fields from ERA5. A graph neural network learns the relationship between atmospheric state and soaring outcomes; a reinforcement-learned policy then searches for the energy-optimal path through that predicted environment in real time.
The ground segment is a fully containerised, event-driven pipeline that ingests raw telemetry from the satellite link and exposes it to scientists and the public within seconds of transmission.
Starlink aviation terminal connects the glider terminal to a ground cluster, exposing telemetry data with Prometheus every second. A ground gateway publishes each frame to Apache Kafka topics partitioned by sensor type, providing durable, replayable event storage.
Stateful stream processors running on Kubernetes perform unit conversion, sensor fusion, anomaly detection and quality-control flagging in under 200 ms from message receipt — before data ever reaches the dashboard.
All telemetry is persisted in TimescaleDB for time-series queries and in S3-compatible object storage as Parquet files for long-term scientific archival. Raw data is made openly available under CC0 licence.
In addition to the basic data shown in the main live streaming panel, detailed Grafana dashboards remain available with both live and historical data, showing the flight path, sensor readings and battery state updated every second.
The cockpit camera feeds a Janus WebRTC gateway via the satellite link. Adaptive bitrate encoding adjusts from 2 Mbps over the Pacific down to 512 kbps over poor-coverage areas to maintain continuous broadcast.
Workloads are spread across three cloud regions to ensure sub-second failover. GitOps with ArgoCD manages all deployments; Prometheus and Alertmanager provide 24/7 SRE coverage throughout the flight.
Klaus is a four-time world champion and, with over 60 world records, the most successful glider pilot of all time. In addition to his successful practice as a dentist, he worked in his own mountain flying school “Quo Vadis” in southern France.
Ricardo is a passionate glider pilot and instructor, and during working hours a computing engineer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He's been promoting and advocating technology developments for scientific computing.
Jean-Marc is...
Initial route analysis, energy budgeting across all legs, partnership discussions with key scientific institutions.
Prototype airframe achieves first flight. Electric propulsion system validated.
All instrument packages integrated and flight-tested; Starlink aviation terminal calibrated.
Mission launch, pending final airworthiness certification and remaining overflight permit approvals.
Expected touchdown after approximately 90 days airborne, completing the first electric glider circumnavigation.
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