Posted on 01/22/2014 9:45:45 PM PST by Seizethecarp
The aerostats — that is the term for lighter-than-air craft that are tethered to the ground — are to be set aloft on Army-owned land about 45 miles northeast of Washington, near Aberdeen Proving Ground, for a three-year test slated to start in October. From a vantage of 10,000 feet, they will cast a vast radar net from Raleigh, N.C., to Boston and out to Lake Erie, with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft so they could be intercepted before reaching the capital.
Defense contractor Raytheon last year touted an exercise in which it outfitted the aerostats planned for deployment in suburban Baltimore with one of the company’s most powerful high-altitude surveillance systems, capable of spotting individual people and vehicles from a distance of many miles.
The Army said it has “no current plans” to mount such cameras or infrared sensors on the aerostats or to share information with federal, state or local law enforcement, but it declined to rule out either possibility.
The aerostats planned for Maryland will have radar capable of detecting airborne objects from up to 340 miles away and vehicles on the surface from up to 140 miles away — as far south as Richmond, as far west as Cumberland, Md., and as far north as Staten Island. The Army declined to say what size vehicles can be sensed from those distances.
For the Raytheon test, the MTS-B spotted a person pretending to be a terrorist planting an improvised roadside bomb, even though the view was obscured by smoke from a nearby forest fire, according to a Raytheon news release from January 2013. Operators could see live feeds of “trucks, trains and cars from dozens of miles away.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
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Maryland “Freak State” PING!
Here's a clue. The word 'aeroflot' is Russian.
Oops. Meant to say ‘aerostat’. Doesn’t matter, both words are Russian.
How far apart are her contractions?
Where exactly IN THE PHOTOGRAPH are any words visible? The uniforms and possibly red colored star look Russian to me.
And aerostat is derived from Greek not Russian.
If you check the URL it comes from a Russian source.
The words were in the article. A poster asked me if the aerostat in the photo was Russian.
The uniforms and possibly red colored star look Russian to me.
Which was why I remarked about the Russian origin of the word.
And aerostat is derived from Greek not Russian.
Russians, Greeks,... they're all furreners who used to use a lot of aerostats, even back during WWI.
Do you know the Russian word for aerostat ?
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