Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaissance
[4] It has direct applications for search and rescue, counterdrug, disaster relief and impact assessment, and homeland security, and has been deployed by the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) in the US on the Australian-built Gippsland GA8 Airvan fixed-wing aircraft.
[2] CAP, the civilian auxiliary of the United States Air Force, is a volunteer education and public-service non-profit organization that conducts aircraft search and rescue in the US.
[5] The system uses a special camera facing down through a quartz glass portal in the belly of the aircraft, which is typically flown at a standard mission altitude of 2,500 feet (760 meters) and 100 knots (50 meters/second) ground speed.
[5] As of January 2007[update], CAP reported completing the initial deployment of 16 aircraft throughout the U.S. and training over 100 operators, but had only used the system on a few search and rescue missions, and had not credited it with being the first to find any wreckage.
[1] An ARCHER equipped aircraft from the Utah Wing of the Civil Air Patrol was used in the search for adventurer Steve Fossett in September 2007.
[3][10] ARCHER did not locate Mr. Fossett, but was instrumental in uncovering eight previously uncharted crash sites in the high desert area of Nevada,[11][12] some decades old.
"[1] Major Cynthia Ryan of the Nevada Civil Air Patrol, while also describing the system to the press in 2007, stated, "ARCHER is essentially something used by the geosciences.
[19] Since then, in the case of a flight originating in Missouri, the ARCHER system proved its usefulness in October 2006, when it found the wreckage in Antlers, Okla.[20] The National Transportation and Safety Board was extremely pleased with the data ARCHER provided, which was later used to locate aircraft debris spread over miles of rough, wooded terrain.
[citation needed] The major ARCHER subsystem components include:[6] The passive hyperspectral imaging spectroscopy remote sensor observes a target in multi-spectral bands.
The horizontal line image is then projected onto a diffraction grating, which is a very finely etched reflecting surface that disperses light into its spectra.
At an aircraft altitude of 2,500 ft AGL and a speed of 100 knots, a 60 Hz frame rate equates to a ground image resolution of approximately one square meter per pixel.
[2] In spectral signature matching, the system can be programmed with the parameters of a missing aircraft, such as paint colors, to alert the operators of possible wreckage.
[3] It can also be used to look for specific materials, such as petroleum products or other chemicals released into the environment,[18] or even ordinary items like commonly available blue polyethylene tarpaulins.
