When the Olympic Games begin next month in Rio de Janeiro, billions of people are expected to watch athletes from countries around the world compete.
But also watching over the Olympic and Paralympic events will be a set of futuristic, balloon-mounted surveillance camera systems capable of monitoring a wide swath of the city in high resolution and in real-time.
Initially developed for use by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan by Fairfax, Virginia-based Logos Technologies, the technology is sold under the nameSimera, and offers live aerial views of a large area, or what the company calls “wide-area motion imagery,” captured from a balloon tethered some 200 meters above the ground. The system’s 13 cameras make it possible for operators to record detailed, 120-megapixel imagery of the movement of vehicles and pedestrians below in an area up to 40 square kilometers, depending on how high the balloon is deployed, and for up to three days at a time.
The Brazil sale, which includes four systems operated under an $8 million contract, marks the first export of Simera, and the first time such as system will be deployed by a non-U.S. government at a large-scale event, the company says. “Simera was built late last year and we tested it this past February and then immediately sold four of them to Brazil,” says Doug Rombough, Logos’s vice president of business development. – READ MORE
