The YEH-60B SOTAS (Stand-Off Target Acquisition System) was designed to detect moving targets on the battlefield and downlink the information to an Army ground station. The Army and the Air Force have long recognized the need for an all-weather system capable of detecting, locating, tracking, and classifying surface targets. Early efforts led the Army to design the Stand-off Target Acquisition System (SOTAS) to fulfill this need, while the Air Force developed the PAVE MOVER system to accomplish the same goal. Only one YEH-60B was built for the US Army. Lockheed Missiles & Space Company [LMSC] won an $11 million contract in March 1980 to design, develop and test a precision radar antenna for the Army's Stand-Off Target Acquisition System. SOTAS, a helicopter-based, MTI-only system, ran into cost and technical problems during full scale development. Recognizing overlap in the Army and Air Force programs, in 1982 the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USDRE) combined the SOTAS and Pave Mover efforts into a joint program, later designated Joint STARS. (Joint-Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System).
BAE Systems has finally acknowledged that it has flown the ARGUS-IS gigapixel surveillance sensor developed for DARPA. The flights took place between June and November last year, with the ARGUS pod slung under the US Army's long-legged YEH-60-60B testbed.
Photo: BAE Systems
ARGUS is designed to overcome the narrow "soda-straw" field of view of conventional surveillance sensors by providing multiple real-time video streams without the weight of the multi-camera systems fitted to aircraft like the Project Liberty MC-12W. DARPA says ARGUS can provide up to 65 "Predator-class" steerable video streams.
The 1.8-gigapixel sensor has four optical telescopes, each with 92 5-megapixel focal-plane arrays - cellphone camera chips, says BAE. The airborne processor combines the video output from all 368 arrays together to create a single mosaic image, with an update rate of 12-15 frames a second.
