DARPA, the agency for developing new tech for the Department of Defense, has created the most terrifying high tech camera drone ever to exist.
The ARGUS-IS is a 1.8 gigapixel camera that will be attached to unmanned drones. It can spot targets as small as six inches from an altitude 20,000 feet. The high resolution system can view ten square miles of terrain at a time and can zoom in on targets while maintaining a ridiculous amount of clarity.
ARGUS stands for Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System.
The system uses 368, five megapixel camera sensors aimed through a telescopic array. It’s so powerful it can pick out birds mid-flight, and people as they get out of their cars in parking lots.
It captures 600 gigabytes of data per second, and 1 million terabytes per day. There’s so much data that it’s functionally impossible to send all of it to the control room. To remedy this, DARPA created the Persistics system that pings points of interest in the scene as ARGUS hovers overhead.
ARGUS will go up in the newly created unmanned Hummingbird drone, three of them are being deployed to Afghanistan for the next year.
Nation
Do you think the ARGUS will be used for something besides the surveillance of war zones? Is this tech the beginning to a full scale Big Brother watching us society? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments below!