"With Air Force's Gorgon Drone 'we can see everything'" (Summary)
This article highlights the latest in the Gorgon Stare saga, a story of an unmanned sensing system that breaks the mold- observing a city all at once, and documenting everything it sees. The article begins with a circulated and speculated-over photo depicting a U.S. Air Force MQ-9 Reaper in Afghanistan carrying what the article surmises are new Gorgon Stare modules (called Increment II).
The article points to the limitations of current Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) sensors that can only observe one thing at a time (also know as the Soda Straw Effect). The Gorgon Stare, it reports can send 65 different images to users simultaneously. Perhaps the greatest achievement of this new technology is its ability to track patterns of life, offering a forensic analysis of movement.
The Gorgon Stare made a public appearance in the PBS documentary Rise of the Drones, where the documentary pointed to it as the future of unmanned warfare. The technology enabling the Gorgon Stare is disturbingly simple in theory: it is the cobbling together of 386 five-megapixel smartphone cameras that results in a 1.81 billion megapixel sensor. The article explains that the name Gorgon refers to a mythical Greek creature with an unblinking eye that would turn all who beheld it to stone. All in all, it gives this futuristic sensor a science fiction aura.
The second half of the article turns the readers' attention to the military's use of intelligence, and questions whether more information (like that provided by Gorgon Stare) is actually a solution to a problem. It details how intelligence analysts watch hours of mind-numbing surveillance video without result. One idea to file the massive amount of imagery that Gorgon Stare will create is to catalog the imagery by location and event. "[A]n analyst in Afghanistan can retrieve the last month's worth of bombings in a particular stretch of road with a push of a button."
Pointing to the future, the article addresses some of the Air Force's ideas of how the technology will be used. The Air Force reportedly wants to implement wide-area surveillance systems on airships, and hopes to replace boots on the ground to some degree with better sensing systems. Air Force officials also say that the system will have civilian potential being used in border surveillance and natural disasters.
References:
Nakashima, E., Whitlock, C. (2011). With Air Force's Gorgon Drone, 'we can see everything.' The Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com. Web. Accessed 18 Jan 2015
Jennings, G. (2014). USAF Image Appears to Show Gorgon Stare Increment II in Afghanistan. IHS Janes 360. www.janes.com. Web. Accessed 18 Jan 2015
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