Afghan Air Force to deploy airborne surveillance system soon

KABUL - Afghanistan Air Force would reportedly deploy a revolutionary airborne surveillance system ‘Gorgon Stare’ this winter, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.

According to The Washington Post, the system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements, and can also send up to 65 different images to different users.

Air Force drones today shot video from a single camera over a “soda straw” area the size of a building or two.

The paper quoted Major General James O. Poss, the Air Force’s Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, as saying that the usage of the new technology would help analysts avoid guessing where to point the camera.

“Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything,” he added.

The development of Gorgon Stare began about 18 months ago, and is based on the work of Air Force scientists who came up with the idea of stitching together views from multiple cameras shooting two frames per second at half-meter resolution, the paper said.

Currently full-motion video is shot at 30 frames per second from one camera mounted on a Predator or the larger Reaper drone, it added. (ANI)