Advanced UAVs help war on terrorism -- and companies' bottom line

Global Hawk, a long-endurance, high-altitude drone that can fly for thirty hours at a time at more than 60,000 feet, out of range of most antiaircraft missiles and undetectable to the human eye.

Peter Singer, author of Wired for War, a book about robotic warfare, compares the technology to the popular “Where’s Waldo” children’s books, in which readers are challenged to find one person hidden in a mass of people.

The latest detectors not only can pick out Waldo from a crowd but also know when Waldo may have fired a rifle. Sensors can detect the heat from the barrel of a gun and estimate when it was fired.

Many of the sensors have been developed by Raytheon engineers in El Segundo, one of the Beach Cities of Los Angeles County, where the company has had a long history of developing spy equipment, including that found on the famed U-2 spy plane.

Some of the more advanced cameras can cost more than $15 million and take eighteen months to make. Raytheon develops the cameras in a humidity-controlled, dust-free laboratory to ensure that they are free of blemishes.

Each basketball-size camera “must be perfect,” said Oscar Fragoso, a Raytheon optical engineer. “If it isn’t, we know we’re putting lives at risk.”

Raytheon has begun to face stiff competition as other aerospace contractors vie for its business.

Sparks, Nevada-based Sierra Nevada Corp., which is known for its work on developing parts for spy satellites, has developed a sensor system, named the Gorgon Stare, that widens the area that drones can monitor from 1 mile to nearly three miles.

Named for the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turns victims to stone, the sensor system features 12 small cameras, instead of one large one. It is to be affixed to Reaper drones before the end of the year.

With the multiple cameras, the operator can follow numerous vehicles instead of just one, said Brig. Gen. Robert Otto, the U.S. Air Force’s director of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “By the end of the year, we’re going to be fielding capabilities that are unlike anything we’ve used before.”

With an increase in the number of drone patrols and new sensor technology, the Air Force will be “drowning in data,” Otto said. “That means we’re going to need a lot more people looking at computer screens.”

The Pentagon has said that drones last year took so much video footage that it would take someone twenty-four years to watch it all.

By this time next year, the Air Force expects to have almost 5,000 people trawling through the images for intelligence information. That’s up from little more than 1,200 nine years ago.

“The reconnaissance work that’s being done now takes seconds, where it used to take days,” Otto said. “We’re pushing the edge of technology.”