Veratech Phantom Sentinel - The Invisible UAV
Saturday, October 14th, 2006
Trust the military to keep coming up with cool technology. This new one is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that is both invisible to radar and to observers!
Everyone pretty much knows how invisibility to radar works: you fly out of the radar’s coverage (usually “under” the coverage) or you are small enough to not be noticed (because you don’t reflect enough of the signal back to the radar). So how did they pull off the ‘invisible to the naked eye’ part?
Well, the [tag]invisibility[/tag] technology is based on the concept of persistence of vision. The theory behind persistence of vision says that our visual system somehow retains an image for a brief moment. This contributes to the illusion of motion when frames of film are played at a high speed. Kinda like the flipbook trick.
As for the Veratech Phantom Sentinel, it has a center of rotation outside of the fuselage. So that means it doesn’t spin like a fan but kinda around itself, if you get what I mean. So I’m guessing that since our eyes are not really focusing on a fixed center on the Phantom Aero, we ‘miss’ it because of our persistence of vision. It’s kinda like if you drive fast enough, the speed cameras cannot get you (you have to drive REALLY fast though). It’s not real invisibility, just an illusion of invisibility.
Because of all the rotating it does, the [tag]Phantom Sentinel[/tag] has a very high degree of stability, even while hovering straight up in the air. Plus, its minimal cross section lets it ’slice’ thru any weather conditions making it virtually an all-weather recon vehicle.
Surveillance is achieved via a high speed 360 degrees viewing camera.
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