got geoint?

This week, the US Air Force confirmed that it is flying a stealth unmanned aircraft known as the “Beast of Kandahar,” a drone spotted in photos and, until now has been shrouded in secrecy. The RQ-170 Sentinel is being developed by Lockheed Martin and is designed “to provide reconnaissance and surveillance support to forward deployed combat forces,” the air force said in a brief statement. Aviation experts dubbed the drone the “Beast of Kandahar” after photographs emerged earlier this year showing the mysterious aircraft in southern Afghanistan in 2007. Read more here.

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The Army has launched a new laser-based 3D mapping robot that can create imagery of the surrounding area by using lasers. It uses a mirror-based LIDAR system that “bounces a laser off a rapidly rotating mirror and gleans environmental information from how long it takes for each pulse to bounce back.” Called ROAMS (Remotely Operated and Autonomous Mapping System) the robot created by researchers at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, with funding from the U.S. Army. It uses several existing mapping technologies to build 3D color maps of its surroundings, and it was demonstrated at the 2009 IEEE conference on Technologies for Practical Robot Applications in Woburn, MA. So, is this the next generation of GEOINT? To us, it seems like an excellent addition to providing situational awareness for the warfighter. What do you all think?

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