Microsoft inked an enormous, multi-billion-dollar deal to deliver high-tech augmented reality goggles for the US Army. The gadget is based on Microsoft’s HoloLens, although the Army refers to it as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS. The devices are a head-up display with night-vision tech and more, and while they promise to be a futuristic way for soldiers to receive information and see the battlefield, they’ve been delayed due to an issue related to the scope of its field of view. We’ll know more about how these devices are doing next year.
Down at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, mechanical dogs from Ghost Robotics joined the security team to patrol the base in March. The legged bots can hit a top speed of just 4.5 mph and function as a “mobile sensor platform,” as one base official described them, meaning they can feed information back to humans.
While robots help out on land, up in the sky their winged cousins conduct their own missions. In October, DARPA demonstrated an eye-catching stunt: It used a C-130 cargo aircraft to grab a drone out of the sky and pull it into the mothership. The idea behind the program, called Gremlins, is that snagging the drones and bringing them into a cargo plane mid-air is a way to recover and reuse these aerial assets. In other DARPA news, the agency tested out a hypersonic missile in September—the weapon concept it demonstrated went faster than Mach 5.
Drones and other uncrewed vehicles, like hypersonic weapons, are certainly not the only military innovations to zoom through the skies. In April, the Air Force took the wraps off its latest fighter jet and announced its official name, the F-15EX Eagle II. It’s the most modern US version of an aircraft that dates back to the 1960s and 70s and was first created to be an air-to-air dominance machine. Read a deep dive on the new aircraft here.
Russia, meanwhile, unveiled its own new fighter jet, called Checkmate. Unlike the F-15EX, this new jet is stealthy, and is most frequently compared to the F-35 but promises to be less expensive. The Drive, a sibling website to PopSci, has more on the plane’s progress.
Helicopters are some of the most dynamic and maneuverable flying machines around, and May of this year marked the 10-year anniversary of the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Popular Science took a look back at what we know about the stealth helicopters that were part of the covert mission from Afghanistan into neighboring Pakistan in 2011.
And in other helicopter news, we tagged along in May on a training mission with the US Coast Guard in a MH-60T helicopter to see how they train for hoist rescues at sea. The dramatic, dynamic process involved a brave “duck” being lowered into the frothy waters below the chopper off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Source : https://www.popsci.com/technology/best-military-tech-stories/
