Gorgon Stare is a

video capture Video capture is the process of converting an analog video signal—such as that produced by a video camera, DVD player, or television tuner—to digital video and sending it to local storage or to external circuitry. The resulting digital data ar ...

technology developed by the

United States military The United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. The armed forces consists of six service branches: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. The president of the United States is ...

. It is a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone. The

US Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Sig ...

calls it "wide-area surveillance sensor system".Air Force Magazine.com: ''The New Normal for RPAs'', by Marc V. Schanz, Senior Editor
, November 2011, Vol. 94, No. 11, page53.

Background

The system is capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city, which can then be analyzed by people or an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

, such as the

Mind's Eye A mental image is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of 'perceiving' some object, event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses. There are ...

project being developed by the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

. This motion imagery is not considered video as it is collected at fewer frames per second than the standard definition of video; TV-like quality of video is 24–60 FPS. Gorgon Stare needs to utilize a system of tagging and

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

to be fully effective. The Air Force planned to deliver one system in 2011, another in 2012, and a third in 2014, though they would not enter service until accepted by the commander in the theatre of operations. Gorgon Stare was under development for more than two years and is designed to download 65 different images to a variety of military users for analysis; this is what is referred to as "wide-area persistent surveillance." During the

Global War on Terror The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is an ongoing international counterterrorism military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks. The main targets of the campaign are militant ...

, using

unmanned aerial vehicle An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without any human pilot, crew, or passengers on board. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which includes adding a ground-based controll ...

s for persistent surveillance dramatically changed the way the U.S. military pursued fleeting targets. However, their sensors provided very narrow fields of view, referred to by warfighters as looking at the battlefield through a "soda straw," allowing insurgents to disappear from view and not giving information on what was happening in surrounding areas. In 2009, the

U.S. Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Sign ...

began development of a wide-area surveillance system to enable the

MQ-9 Reaper The General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper (sometimes called Predator B) is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of remotely controlled or autonomous flight operations developed by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) primarily for the Un ...

long-endurance UAV to survey an entire small city from . Requiring fewer systems to recon a large area frees up more available assets to be able to perform other missions and enables operations to be more limited where a light "footprint" is desired.Air Force's Secret "Gorgon Stare" Program Leaves Terrorists Nowhere To Hide
- Forbes.com, 10 April 2015

Development

''Gorgon Stare'' was developed and tested on the

Eglin Air Force Base Eglin Air Force Base is a United States Air Force (USAF) base in the western Florida Panhandle, located about southwest of Valparaiso in Okaloosa County. The host unit at Eglin is the 96th Test Wing (formerly the 96th Air Base Wing). The 9 ...

, Florida with the

53rd Wing The 53d Wing is a wing of the United States Air Force based at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The wing reports to the United States Air Force Warfare Center at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, which in turn reports to Headquarters Air Combat Comman ...

. These sensor pods had been in development since 2009 by the Air Force's

Big Safari Big Safari is a United States Air Force program begun in 1952 which provides management, direction, and control of the acquisition, modification, and logistics support for special purpose weapons systems derived from existing aircraft and systems. ...

group and

Sierra Nevada Corporation Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) is an American, privately held aerospace and national security contractor specializing in aircraft modification and integration, space components and systems, and related technology products for cybersecurity and ...

.AirForcTimes.com: ''Air Force stands by Gorgon Stare program''
, by Ben Iannotta - C4ISR Journal Writer, posted Tuesday Jan 25, 2011 14:15:59 EST In January 2011, it was announced that the program was not performing to expectations, and included faults such as "a large black triangle moving throughout the image" due to failure to combine the images taken by the multiple cameras, a faulty coordinate grid for the chipped-out imagery, inferior image quality compared to older systems, a problematic night-vision system, inability to track people on the surface, delays of up to eighteen seconds in sending data to the ground, and an incompatibility with the handheld Rover 5 computers. In response, the Air Force said that several of the flaws had been fixed since the report detailing the issues had been written, that the system was never designed to offer high-resolution imagery over a wide area, and that in some areas the testing was "not sufficiently constructed to objectively evaluate the capabilities of the system," according to an anonymous source involved with the program. Development costs are in the $15 million range. This sensor could photograph an area with a four-kilometer radius underneath the MQ-9 Reaper. The Reaper can fly both day and night operations from 12 angles; as reported by Robert Marlin, a technical adviser for the Air Force. The first Gorgon Stare system consisted of two sensor pods, one carrying

electro-optical Electro–optics is a branch of electrical engineering, electronic engineering, materials science, and material physics involving components, electronic devices such as lasers, laser diodes, LEDs, waveguides, etc. which operate by the pr ...

(EO) and

infrared camera Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from around ...

s (IR), the other digital processors and

data-link A data link is the means of connecting one location to another for the purpose of transmitting and receiving digital information (data communication). It can also refer to a set of electronics assemblies, consisting of a transmitter and a recei ...

s that enabled quick transmission of actionable intelligence to operations centers and troops in the field. The system delivered three "tiers" of surveillance down to small details within the broader field of view, so users receiving images within seconds after collection could identify items of immediate tactical interest, and recorded data would be stored for up to 30 days. Two Reapers could provide continuous surveillance over a large area to track enemy movements and use recorded data to conduct after-action analyses. Lt. Gen. Craig Koziol, the director of the ISR Task Force, reported in a news conference that ''Gorgon Stare'' was planned to be deployed in December 2011. From March 2011 to July 2014, the first increment of the system performed 10,000 hours of direct combat support,This New Drone Sensor Can Scan a Whole City at Once
- Medium.com/War-is-Boring, 9 September 2014 achieving a 95 percent availability rate. With its initial success, the Air Force began refining the system, since the first version was experimental and deployed quickly to address pressing tactical needs.

Phase two

Phase two (also referred to as Increment 2, or "Inc two") integrated processes of tracking algorithms from the

ARGUS-IS The ARGUS-IS, or the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project contracted to BAE Systems. ARGUS is an advanced camera system that uses hundreds of cellphon ...

system. Argus is a system of tools also developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. On 1 July 2014,

revealed that the Gorgon Stare Increment 2 pod had achieved initial operating capability (IOC) earlier in the year. While the Increment 1 system, first fielded in March 2011, could cover an area of , the incorporation of the ARGUS-IS expands that coverage area to . The system has 368 cameras capable of capturing 5 million pixels each to create an image of about 1.8 billion pixels. Video is collected at a variable frame-rate per second, with the resulting data output averaging several

gigabyte The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix '' giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB. This definit ...

s of video output per minute. Increment 2 provides a four-fold increase in coverage and twice the imagery resolution thanks to ARGUS technology; ARGUS is essentially 368 five-

megapixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the ...

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whi ...

cameras clustered together and peering through four telescopic lenses and is produced by

BAE Systems BAE Systems plc (BAE) is a British multinational arms, security, and aerospace company based in London, England. It is the largest defence contractor in Europe, and ranked the seventh-largest in the world based on applicable 2021 revenue ...

, while the IR arrays are produced by Exelis Inc. and are the largest available, which were separated from the EO sensors and moved to the adjacent pod. Sierra Nevada Corporation remained the overall system integrator, meaning it is responsible for merging the sensors, processors, data-links and air vehicle into one package that distributes information in real-time with minimal latency through the joint force's tactical intelligence network. By early 2015, Increment 2 had replaced all initial versions of the Gorgon Stare in operational service. 151205-F-CX842-180

Similar systems

A similar system was planned to be installed on the Blue Devil blimp, a spy blimp developed for the

. However, the Blue Devil was cancelled in 2012. In 2006, a similar wide-area surveillance system,

Constant Hawk Constant Hawk is a United States Army wide-area motion imagery system flown on manned reconnaissance aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan. Constant Hawk was the first airborne Wide Area Persistent Sensor developed and deployed by the United States. ...

, was being tested by the

US Army The United States Army (USA) is the land service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army of the United States in the U.S. Constitution.Article II, section 2, cla ...

. Also, in 2007, the Marine Corps tested an upgrade of the Constant Hawk, called Angel Fire. Both of these sensors were mounted under aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

References

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External links