it's like saying that Netflix sends "one million terabytes per day"... if you are looking at the decompessed bitmaps
Gorgon Stare is the platform to which the ARGUS-IS system is basically a camera upgrade. It works by "tiering" the data so objects of tactical interest get downlinked quicker and more frequently. You're certainly not sending raw bitmaps over the air
I would imagine that you would effectively take a "keyframe" image and then record "P-frames" on top of that like any other compression system. Only instead of a psychovisual model you have a psycho-tactical model, where you want to throw lots of bandwidth at the objects of interest and not so much to everything else.
But yeah, 6 petabytes per day is the throughput of the camera system. Most of the data will be compressed away especially on the live downlinks, and they will probably only retrieve a high-quality copy of the full "historical" data (with high-quality data on objects that aren't designated "interesting") at the end of the mission when the Reaper lands.
After all, you just can't beat the bandwidth of a Reaper full of tapes hurtling down the runway...
Time for napkin math! If you figure they are putting out 6 petabytes (6000 terabytes) of raw data per day, and let's say they are flying 20 commodity hard drives at 10 TB per drive... that gives you 200 TB per day of video, and you'd need to hit a compression ratio of 30:1 over the uncompressed bitmaps.
Seems plausible, like I bet you could get that out of a standard H264 encoder with decent quality (assuming it supports the resolutions - or you start chunking the video up). Even a more reasonable figure like 5-10 hard drives per day (60-120x compression) would probably still be within the reach of standard encoders. H264 is pretty good especially when your baseline is "raw bitmaps".
Remember, the US military doesn't give a fuck about money. Flying out a couple C-17s of hard drives every month to support a whole combat theater is chump change, especially if it means other hardware/wetware isn't getting blown up. And at least with the Gorgon Stare system they only retained data for 30 days, so we're not even talking about a huge throughput in terms of hardware for permanent retention.
edit: here is a more serious technical analysis of it that I dug up
Gorgon Stare is the platform to which the ARGUS-IS system is basically a camera upgrade. It works by "tiering" the data so objects of tactical interest get downlinked quicker and more frequently. You're certainly not sending raw bitmaps over the air
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
I would imagine that you would effectively take a "keyframe" image and then record "P-frames" on top of that like any other compression system. Only instead of a psychovisual model you have a psycho-tactical model, where you want to throw lots of bandwidth at the objects of interest and not so much to everything else.
But yeah, 6 petabytes per day is the throughput of the camera system. Most of the data will be compressed away especially on the live downlinks, and they will probably only retrieve a high-quality copy of the full "historical" data (with high-quality data on objects that aren't designated "interesting") at the end of the mission when the Reaper lands.
After all, you just can't beat the bandwidth of a Reaper full of tapes hurtling down the runway...
Time for napkin math! If you figure they are putting out 6 petabytes (6000 terabytes) of raw data per day, and let's say they are flying 20 commodity hard drives at 10 TB per drive... that gives you 200 TB per day of video, and you'd need to hit a compression ratio of 30:1 over the uncompressed bitmaps.
Seems plausible, like I bet you could get that out of a standard H264 encoder with decent quality (assuming it supports the resolutions - or you start chunking the video up). Even a more reasonable figure like 5-10 hard drives per day (60-120x compression) would probably still be within the reach of standard encoders. H264 is pretty good especially when your baseline is "raw bitmaps".
Remember, the US military doesn't give a fuck about money. Flying out a couple C-17s of hard drives every month to support a whole combat theater is chump change, especially if it means other hardware/wetware isn't getting blown up. And at least with the Gorgon Stare system they only retained data for 30 days, so we're not even talking about a huge throughput in terms of hardware for permanent retention.
edit: here is a more serious technical analysis of it that I dug up
http://ambivalentengineer.blogspot.com/2012/08/argus-is.html