Edited for brevity.
A blue-and-white blimp floated a thousand feet above farms and fields, its sophisticated sensors scanning the ground, on the hunt for a mock terrorist camp. Long associated with providing television shots at football games and selling tires, blimps could play a key role in homeland security, say military researchers, who envision dirigibles hovering over Washington, protecting the region. During last fall’s sniper crisis, in fact, the military tried to deploy a blimp with sensors capable of spotting a flash from a firearm’s muzzle. This week, during a demonstration of blimps armed with cutting-edge sensor technology, a 260-foot airship drifted over the woods near Manassas, where a set of blue tarps was strung across the ground to represent a terrorist encampment.
Great--we’ve got the Smurf terrorist threat covered at least...
The color-sensitive sensors aboard the blimp easily detected the tarps despite a thick canopy of trees. The location was outlined in red on a monitor. Inside a gray turret attached to the gondola’s outer frame, a high-resolution camera turned its lens toward the terrain in question, verifying the find. The Office of Naval Research, based in Arlington, is advocating the use of sensor-equipped airships for various missions, including detecting chemical attacks, tracking submarines or other underwater threats, identifying military targets for attack, aiding in search-and-rescue operations and finding drug laboratories. Airplanes must keep circling to stay atop a target area, and hovering in a helicopter is a bone-shaking, fuel-consuming ordeal. Blimps can loiter with little noise and vibration -- conditions ideal for sensors -- and cost much less to operate than planes and helicopters. The demonstration featured the Littoral Airborne Sensor Hyperspectral (LASH) system, a sensor that detects minute color shifts that the human eye cannot see. This year, a LASH-equipped blimp was able to track 30 North Atlantic right whales off the northeast coast of Florida, providing scientists with valuable data about the highly endangered species, said Gregory Plumb, airship operations manager for Science & Technology International, the Honolulu company that developed the system. Last October, Navy teams outfitted a blimp with a sniper-detection system known as VIPER to help find the shooters terrorizing the Washington area. |