Iran's Unmanned Flying Tea Cup
The official Iranian news service, the Fars News Agency has announced that the Islamic Republic has built an unmanned flying saucer. Quote from the release:
“The unmanned flying saucer, named “Zohal”, was unveiled in a ceremony attended by Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei. Zohal, designed and developed jointly by Farnas Aerospace Company and Iranian Aviation and Space Industries Association (IASIA), can be used for various missions, specially for aerial imaging. The flying machine is equipped with an auto-pilot system, GPS (Global Positioning System) and two separate imaging systems with full HD 10 mega-pixel picture quality and is able to take and send images simultaneously. Zohal uses a small, portable navigation and monitoring center for transmission of data and images and can fly in both outdoor and indoor spaces.”
Zohal = Saturn in English
Iran has a history of bizarre technical achievements:
- Last autumn, it announced the Bavar 2 – a Flying Boat packed with weapons and surveillance equipment and invisible to radar.
- Later in the year, it unveiled the Dancing Humanoid Robot named Surena-2
- Iran has also announced that it has successfully fired a rocket that carried a mouse, a turtle and worms into space and insists it will be able to send a man into space in nine years’ time….
Giving them the benefit of the doubt for a moment, as Evan Ackermann points out in IEEE, it could just be a device that uses the Coandă effect – the effect that causes air (or any fluid) to tend to stick to a curved surface. The UAS has a rotor at the top that thrusts air downward, and the air sticks to the body of the UAS, flowing around and down over the curved bottom edge to provide lift and thrust. Vanes around the edges of the UAS are used for steering and to counter the torque of the single rotor.
A discrete (apparently UK-based) company Aesir (the collective name for the principal race of Norse gods who lived in Asgard) has developed a working model based on this principle:
Sources: Fars News Agency, IEEE, The Daily Mail, Wikepedia, YouTube