While the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) completed some of testing and research of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) traffic management system as directed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), we still have a lot to learn before UAS can be safely and broadly integrated into our national airspace. To date, NASA maintains that the U.S. does not “have a system in place that’s going to keep UAS safely separated from each other. And especially if we’re going beyond the line of sight of the operator, we don’t have all the bits and pieces right now in the airspace system.” But, NASA is set to present its UAS traffic management (UTM) program to the FAA in 2020. To achieve this goal, NASA has partnered with industry giants, like Intel, Google, Amazon Prime, and AirMap, along with many others, to help with the system’s design and functionality. The plan is to design a system that can use data that can be interpreted widely by all UAS. Other technologies, like collision avoidance using visual processing techniques are also a goal of the system. However, a lot of the technologies that NASA is testing have their own challenges as far as environments are concerned. Weather is perhaps the biggest challenge for UTM. NASA says that it needs to do a lot more weather research before implementing a successful UTM. NASA also hopes to study several ‘threat-models’ as well to know how threats like hackers will affect the UTM. All that NASA (and the FAA… and the pubic for that matter) knows is that UTM is absolutely necessary for moving the industry forward and getting more drones into the skies.

[View source.]