In Greek mythology, the Gorgon was a terrifying female monster with venomous snakes growing out of her head. Her unblinking eyes turned to stone all humans who gazed upon her. How scary was she? Her name derives from gorgós, the Greek word for “dreadful.”
But make way for rebranding! Now, she’s the inspiration for a multimillion dollar project the Air Force has just deployed to Afghanistan, “a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.” Snip from 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. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a “soda straw” area the size of a building or two.
With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “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.”
With Air Force’s Gorgon Drone ‘we can see everything’ (Washington Post)
More about the system at globalsecurity.org. It was formerly known as the Wide Area Airborne Surveillance System WAAS, and a diagram showing how it works is below.
