CAPTURED RQ-170 STEALTH DRONE

Iran's declarations that it will reverse engineer the US drone that it grounded makes perfect sense as Washington has had its aircraft duplicated before, writes Peter Grier.

“It's been done before, by a country that at the time the United States considered technologically inferior,” Peter Grier wrote in the Christian Science Monitor on Thursday.

Grier says in August 1947, the USSR paraded a Tu-4 Bull aircraft, a replica of an American B-29 heavy bomber, which the Soviet government had impounded in 1944 after the aircraft was forced to make an emergency landing at a base in the Soviet Union.

Tehran has announced that it intends to carry out reverse engineering on a US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which the Iranian Army's electronic warfare unit successfully brought down with minimal damage on Sunday, December 4, 2011.

The aircraft was flying over the northeastern Iranian city of Kashmar, some 225 kilometers (140 miles) away from the Afghan border.

“Iran isn't going to give it (the spy drone) back … no matter how nicely President Obama asks,” Grier added.

On Monday, US President Barack Obama broke days of silence on the downing of the sophisticated spy aircraft by Iran and made a request to Tehran asking for the return of the drone.

“We've asked for it back. We'll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said.

Following the US plea, Iran's Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi made it clear on Tuesday the US spy drone would remain in the country's possession as part of its national assets.

Also on Monday, former US Vice President Dick Cheney criticized the US president for failing to destroy the spy drone, saying Barack Obama should have ordered an airstrike to quickly destroy the downed high-tech unmanned aerial aircraft to prevent the Islamic Republic from subjecting it to examination.

On December 6, two US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to CNN that the drone had been part of a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reconnaissance mission, involving the US intelligence community stationed in Afghanistan.

They said the reconnaissance capability of the drone enabled it to gather information from inside Iran by flying along Afghanistan's border with the Islamic Republic.

The RQ-170, which is similar in design to a US Air Force B-2 stealth bomber, is designed and developed by the US Lockheed Martin Company.

Tehran says the US spy mission was a “hostile act,” adding it would lodge a complaint with the United Nations over the violation of its air sovereignty by the intelligence-gathering aircraft. It has urged the world body to condemn such contravention and adopt necessary measures to end the 'dangerous and illegal' acts.

Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel at a glance

RQ-170 Sentinel

Artist's rendering
Role	Unmanned aerial vehicle
Manufacturer	Lockheed Martin
Introduction	2007
Primary user	United States Air Force

Operators

United States

United States Air Force
- Air Combat Command
  - 432d Air Expeditionary Wing – Creech Air Force Base, Nevada
    - 30th Reconnaissance Squadron – Tonopah Test Range Airport, Nevada

[edit]Specifications (RQ-170)

Data from ^[37]

General characteristics

Crew: 0
Length: 14 ft 9 in (4.5 m)
Wingspan: 85 ft (26 m) estimated
Height: 6 ft (1.8 m) estimated
Powerplant: 1 × Garrett TFE731 or General Electric TF34^[10] turbofan

Performance

Service ceiling: 50,000 ft (15,240 m) (estimated)

Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS)

Disc-Rotor Compound Helicopter

Falcon HTV-2

Phoenix

Transformer

Vulture

LANdroids (Local Area Network droids)

ChemBots

DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, funds some of the world's most far out, forward-thinking research into new military technology.

Something like Q Branch in the James Bond movies, DARPA is constantly working on what it describes as "radical innovations." But where James Bond has the character Q to build his exploding pens, DARPA often funds private companies and external organizations to develop its high-tech hardware.

It is currently funding research into, among other things, a robot ostrich, a flying car and a plane that could stay airborne for five years at a time.

While some of the technologies it is supporting might seem more suitable for science fiction than the battlefield, the fact that DARPA is willing to fund them is a sign they are at least possible -- if not always plausible. Don't forget, DARPA's Arpanet program is widely credited as being the precursor to today's internet.

So here are some of DARPA's most incredible research programs, which could change the future of warfare, and might one day have applications that extend far beyond the military.

Disc-Rotor Compound Helicopter

The Disc-Rotor is a collaboration between DARPA and Boeing. Hoping to marry the best features of a helicopter and an airplane, the Disc-Rotor program aims to develop a new type of aircraft capable of a seamlessly transitioning from hovering like a helicopter to flying like a plane.

The design is propelled by rotor blades that extend from a central disc, letting it take off and land like a helicopter. But those blades can also retract into the disc, minimizing drag and letting the Disc-Rotor fly like a plane, powered by engines beneath each wing.

Vulture

DARPA's Vulture program is developing the technology to enable an "airborne payload" to remain in the sky for more than five years at a time, performing intelligence, surveillance and communication missions. In practice, that means developing unmanned aircraft that act like satellites.

Boeing is again working on the project, researching its "SolarEagle," a solar-powered, unmanned craft with a 120-meter wing span. It is designed to operate at altitudes above 18,000 meters. Boeing hopes it will make its first demonstration flight in 2014.

ChemBots

Tech company iRobot worked with DARPA on its "ChemBots" program. The aim was to build soft, flexible robots that could deform their bodies to move through openings smaller than themselves (e.g. under doors) to carry out covert tasks.

IRobot used a transitional -- or "jamming" -- material, with properties of both a solid and a liquid, to create a flexible robot that can crawl on six floppy legs. While DARPA's funding has now expired, iRobot is still researching soft robotics and "jamming" technology.

LANdroids (Local Area Network droids)

DARPA also funded iRobot to research its LANdroids program.

The aim was to give soldiers reliable communications in urban areas by creating pocket-sized robots they could scatter as they moved through an area. The robots would each act as a node in a wireless communications network. As the soldiers move, the robots would autonomously move with them, filling gaps in the network.

According to iRobot, the LANdroid it created weighed around one pound, was highly mobile and used a flipper mechanism for self righting and obstacle climbing.

Following the DARPA research, iRobot has developed a throwable robot for soldiers that will be available from 2012. It says the robot could be used to investigate hard-to-access places such as tunnels and ditches.

Falcon HTV-2

The ultimate goal of the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) program is to create a vehicle that can fly anywhere in the world in less than an hour -- while enduring temperatures in excess of 1,925 C (3,500 F).

DARPA has already produced and flown a test HTV-2 -- an unmanned, rocket-launched aircraft that travels at Mach 20 (about 13,000 miles per hour). At that speed a flight between New York City and Los Angeles would take less than 12 minutes.

HTV-2 made its maiden flight in April 2010, but crashed into the Pacific after just nine minutes. A second flight, in August 2011, lasted a similar time before meeting the same end.

Following the second flight HTV-2 program manager Major Chris Schulz said: "We do not yet know how to achieve the desired control during the aerodynamic phase of flight. It's vexing; I'm confident there is a solution. We have to find it."

Phoenix

Communication satellites orbit more than 20,000 miles above the Earth. When they break they usually have to be replaced by launching a new satellite, even though many of these broken satellites still have usable parts, such as antennae and solar arrays.

The Phoenix program is trying to find a way to remove and re-use valuable components from broken or "retired" satellites -- in essence, recycling space junk.

DARPA envisions small "satlets" or "nano satellites" being carried to a broken communication satellite by a "tender" satellite, and then robotically attaching to the broken satellite's antenna.

But before it can become reality they must develop new robotics and remote imaging systems, and design grappling tools to grip, cut, and modify satellite parts.

Transformer

The Transformer program aims to build a flying car for the battlefield. And the car will need to fly itself.

The aim is to create a vertical take-off-and-landing vehicle that can carry four people more than 250 miles on one tank of fuel.

Six contractors are working on the project, including Lockheed Martin, AAI Corp. and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

Sanjiv Singh, a CMU research professor of robotics, said: "In practical terms ... the vehicle will need to be able to fly itself, or to fly with only minimal input from the operator. And this means that the vehicle has to be continuously aware of its environment and be able to automatically react in response to what it perceives."

Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS)

The Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System program is developing binoculars that can identify threats from a long distance and then inform a soldier of the danger.

It will use wide-angle optics and digital imaging, but the really clever bit is its use of "cognitive visual processing algorithms" and "operator neural signature detection processing." That means monitoring the subconscious patterns in a soldier's brain to detect a threat the soldier has perceived before they are even consciously aware of it.