Next Generation of Surveillance

[blacken700]

The ARGUS array is made up of several cameras and other types of imaging systems. The output of the imaging system is used to create extremely large, 1.8GP high-resolution mosaic images and video.
 
The U.S. Army, along with
Boeing, has developed and is preparing to deploy a new unmanned aircraft
called the "Hummingbird." It's is a VTOL-UAS (vertical take-off and
landing unmanned aerial system). Three of them are being deployed to
Afghanistan for a full year to survey and spy on Afghanistan from an
altitude of 20,000 feet with the ability to scan 25 square miles of
ground surface

[avxo]

The ARGUS array is made up of several cameras and other types of imaging systems. The output of the imaging system is used to create extremely large, 1.8GP high-resolution mosaic images and video.
 
The U.S. Army, along with
Boeing, has developed and is preparing to deploy a new unmanned aircraft
called the "Hummingbird." It's is a VTOL-UAS (vertical take-off and
landing unmanned aerial system). Three of them are being deployed to
Afghanistan for a full year to survey and spy on Afghanistan from an
altitude of 20,000 feet with the ability to scan 25 square miles of
ground surface

It's an impressive bit of kit, but it's a little overhyped. If nothing else, it's unclear how exactly they will get the data off the drone in real-time... they need to be able to do wireless data transmission at a sustained rate of tens of gigabytes per second. And they aren't storing the data on the drone itself for later recovery, they'd need ~1700 4TB hard drives capable of operating on a mobile platform to recover 24 hours of video.