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It makes sense that the military wants to have eyes in the sky for surveillance, but when you’re that far away from your target, it can be pretty tough to really see what you want to see. You need more pixels, gigapixels perhaps, and in the case of the US Army, they’ve opted for 1.8 of them.

The A160 Hummingbird was recently unveiled with a new imaging system. Remember that 1.8 gigapixels is 100x more detail than what you’d get with your 18MP digital camera, and it’s usually only with multiple shots that we regular folk can stitch together a gigapixel photo. The kicker is that this hovering aircraft can send back real-time video streams at 10 frames a second too.

When hovering at an altitude of 20,000 feet, the camera has a field of view of almost 65 square miles. The army can then simultaneously track up to 65 targets within this field of view without having to decide which target is the priority. “If you have a bunch of people leaving a place at the same time, they no longer have to say, ‘Do I follow vehicle one, two, three or four,’” said program manager Brian Leninger. “They can say: ‘I will follow all of them, simultaneously and automatically.’”

The drones use the Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) first deployed last year. The first generation drones were manufactured by Boeing, but the military is holding a “full and open” competition for the second generation contract.

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A bird-like surveillance drone crashed in southwestern Pakistan late last week, close to the Afghan border. Some spare parts and a camera were found with it, but they are not pictured. The Pakistani Frontier Corps in Baluchistan province recovered the drone, and they declared it to be an “American surveillance unmanned aerial vehicle.” While the United States does use UAVs to monitor militants in Pakistan, this doesn’t look like anything the military flies. That we know of, anyway.

Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman compared the unidentified drone with the SmartBird drone from Festo, which was inspired by the herring gull. There are notable differences between the two, as the wings of the mystery drone are straighter and more sharply angled than the SmartBird’s rounder wings. The SmartBird’s wings are made up of more than one type of material, while the mystery drone seems to be made of only one type of material. Not to mention that the mystery drone seems to have hosted a propeller and has ailerons, while the SmartBird, pictured below, doesn’t have either.

At any rate, it seems to have crashed on its own, rather than being shot down as the wreckage is almost entirely intact, except for some scorch marks that you can see in the photo.

This could be the work of soldiers toying around with equipment.  It could just as easily be from China, India, or one of the many other countries with UAV capabilities and an insatiable need to spy.

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