US Military Scientists are developing what they claim is a “spy in the sky” – a remote-controlled airborne detection system which can bounce radar off buildings to follow a vehicle though a city.

According to the ‘New Scientist’, Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)  is developing the new radar system, which sees around corners and down into “urban canyons” — in fact, it can track vehicles across an entire city using just a few uncrewed aircraft.

Traditional radar relies on direct line of sight, so it’s often tricky to track a vehicle that keeps nipping behind buildings. But the military scientists believe that by using buildings as mirrors, the Multipath Exploitation Radar will be possible to identify a target vehicle from radar reflections.

The agency is exploring how Multipath Exploitation Radar (MER) might work by driving vehicles around a simulated urban area and collecting returns from an overhead radar. The scientists are aiming to combine the radar

data with a three-dimensional map of the test environment to calculate how the radar reflects off and between vehicles and buildings. This process should highlight which signals in the returning radar data can be used to plot the target vehicle’s path, they say.

“MER is expected to be compatible with the radar systems currently used to track vehicles,” a DARPA spokesman was quoted as saying.

The team anticipates that using reflected radar will cover more ground than a line-of-sight system, making it possible to monitor a city of about 1000 square kilometres, such as Baghdad, with just three airborne radars.

The three-dimensional model of a city needed to make sense of the reflection pattern could be created using LIDAR, the optical surveying technology which is routinely carried on aircraft.

MER makes use of Ku-band radar — frequencies of between 12 and 18 gigahertz. It is sensitive enough to produce distinct signatures for apparently similar vehicles, by detecting slight differences, such as the angle of an aerial or a wing mirror.

DARPA is also looking to develop an algorithm which would enable the system to track multiple vehicles.

Ain Sume of the Swedish Defence Research Agency says the “sound, well-known physical principles” behind MER make it feasible. His team built a radar system that detects people around a corner by using reflections from the opposite wall.

But Sume reckons it will take some time to turn DARPA’s plans into a viable system. Key challenges include maintaining a radar lock as the view shifts from line-of-sight to reflection and back, and establishing a unique radar “fingerprint” for each vehicle.

The next generation of hi-res satellite imaging technology is on the way, at least if the United States government has anything to say about it. The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has awarded satellite imaging firms GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, which provide images for Google and Microsoft among others, contracts upwards of $3.5 billion each to help them get the next wave of imaging technology into the sky.

Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe was given a $3.55 billion 10-year contract, to be paid out in annual installments. Virginia-based GeoEye, whose high-res photos have often been featured on PopSci.com, got the same terms on an even richer $3.8 billion contract. For that kind of cash, the government won’t be accepting incremental improvements.

The NGA — the organ of state responsible for the collection of military and intelligence satellite imagery — wants next-gen technologies with higher-res capabilities as part of its EnhancedView program, an initiative to improve the military/intelligence community’s imaging capability. To that end, DigitalGlobe already issued a statement that it will immediately get cracking on its next satellite, WorldView-3, which could launch in 2014. GeoEye’s third-gen satellite, GeoEye-2, should be operational by 2013.

But the hardware isn’t actually the most costly portion of the contracts. Both agreements stipulate that $2.8 billion of the sum offered is for photos that will be provided to the government over the course of the contract. The balance of each deal is for additional services, infrastructure upgrades, new hardware and the like.

But unlike most massive government contracts, the little guy can expect to see some kind value out of the deal. Though obviously the best high-res imagery goes to the highest bidder (the NGA), both GeoEye and DigitalGlobe provide images for commercial mapping services as well, and better satellites should lead to better publicly available satellite imagery too.

Source: Pop Sci

Will they really be able to read a license plate, or ID an individual from orbit?

What could be the major improvements these satellites will have to offer, well I dont know, but below is a recent article that describes what DARPA is currently looking to develop.

It is a satellite that will deliver real time video.

If we’ve learned something these last couple of years, it’s that the warfighter wants video. But what if you can’t fly a UAV over hostile territory? How about real-time, tactical video from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit? That’s the objective of a new US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program – Membrane Optic Imager Real-time Explotation, or MOIRE.

MOIRE is looking to develop large, lightweight, deployable diffractive membrane optics – basically a wafer-thin lens that unfurls in space – for a geosynchronous imaging satellite. The goal is to fly a 10-meter membrane in Phase 3 of the program, to demonstrate the technology for an operational 20-meter system capable of providing visible-wavelength imagery of “denied areas”.

Concept: L’Garde

According to DARPA, an operational satellite would be able to image an area of more than 100km² at least once a second, with ”NIIRS 3.5+” performance – which equates to a ground resolution better than 2.5 meters, enough to identify aircraft, ships, helipads, radars and other key features. DARPA also wants to be able to detect vehicles moving at highway speeds.

Low cost is another goal, but with a “not-to-exceed” cost target of $500 million a copy, a geosynchronous real-time imaging satellite will be far from cheap. DARPA, meanwhile, has scheduled a MOIRE proposers’ day for interested bidders on March 12 in Washington.

Calling in Close Air Support Currently, soldiers requesting air support have to call in and request it from higher-ups, setting off a time-intensive process of permissions and clearances. DARPA wants to reduce that process to a two-party communication: the soldier on the ground requests an air strike, and a robotic A-10 Warthog above obliges.

Like renewing your driver’s license at the DMV or getting someone from the cable company out to your place, calling in close air support can be a real process for troops on the ground. A request for an air strike from a commander on the ground goes through various higher-ups, analysts, lawyers, and other commanders, slowing the response time to a crawl. That’s why DARPA is launching the Persistent Close Air Support Program (PCAS), under which the scheme is simplified: ground troops ask for a strike, and a robotic warplane brings the ruckus, no middlemen necessary.

A-10 Warthog

The weapon of choice would be an optionally manned/unmanned A-10 Warthog, those destructive and somewhat ugly slow-flying aircraft that can deploy a battery of weapons against enemies below. Fast-acting A-10s would give Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTAC) — the soldiers within units that call in air strikes — the ability to “to visualize, select and employ weapons at the time of their choosing.” DARPA thinks this will “revolutionize how a JTAC is able to request and control near-instantaneous airborne fire support.”

But wait; doesn’t this kind of air-strike-on-demand go against the military’s current strategy of limited air power and reduced civilian casualties as dictated in Af/Pak by the recently ousted General Stanley McChrystal? It absolutely does. But keep in mind this is DARPA, and it’s innovating for battles a decade down the road. The goal of PCAS is to create tools that will reduce the time lag between request for support and an actual air strike from half an hour or more to a matter of minutes.

So don’t read this as a change in policy, but rather as an initiative to remedy what DARPA sees as inefficiencies in the close air support chain. Right now, a radio communication (which may not come in completely clear) sets in motion a machine with a lot of moving parts, any one of which might make a mistake — commanders deciding the necessity and consequences of a strike, intelligence analysts examining footage of the battlefield, legal brass ensuring the strike is in line with the rules of engagement, etc.

DARPA wants to automate this process where possible and condense or remove parts of the process that slow down the close air support process. After all, we (hopefully) won’t be in Afghanistan forever, and on the battlefields of the future the ability to call in instantaneous robotic close air support could be a powerful and potentially devastating tool in America’s arsenal.

Source: Popsci

As “gee-whiz” high-tech wonders seamlessly morph into “your papers, please!,” more often than not in “new normal” America science and technological innovation are little more than deranged handmaids serving corporate crime and political power.

In the interest of “keeping us safe,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unveiled a spiffy new surveillance cam “that puts others to shame,” CNET breezily reported last week.

ISIS The 360 degree surveillance Camera that sees all

The Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance (ISIS) is a hemispherical group of cameras roughly the size of a basketball that, if one believes giddy accolades by enthusiasts touting the system, will lovingly wrap us in a “high-res video quilt,” a DHS press release gushes.

The ultra-wide camera undergoing field-tests since December at Boston’s Logan International Airport, streams distortion free, real-time stitched video and has a resolution capacity of approximately 100 megapixels which our guardians say is “as detailed as 50 full-HDTV movies playing at once, with optical detail to spare. You can zoom in close…and closer…without losing clarity.”

But with an abundance of acronyms, and a decided lack of imagination from a gaggle of secret state agencies, one shouldn’t confuse Homeland Security’s ISIS with one incubating beneath the dark wings of the Pentagon’s “blue sky” office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

That program, Integrated Sensor Is Structure, also known as ISIS, is being shepherded along by Lockheed Martin, America’s No. 1 defense corp. DARPA’s ISIS promises to build an autonomous airship powered by solar fuel cells for American warfighters, one capable of staying aloft for a decade above 70,000 feet, well out of the way of an adversary’s surface to air missiles.

According to the description on the Strategic Technology Office’s web site, their ISIS “will develop the technologies that enable extremely large lightweight phased-array radar antennas to be integrated into an airship platform.” This would enable ground commanders “to track the most advanced cruise missiles at 600 km and dismounted enemy combatants at 300 km.”

Pentagon gurus and the corporations they so lovingly serve, recently awarded Lockheed Martin and subcontracting Raytheon Corporation, a $400 million dollar contract for Phase III work on the radar system, Defense Systems reported in April. DARPAcrats claim the high-flying airship will provide “theatre-wide, persistent area surveillance and tracking capabilities” to America’s Borg Army of resource grabbers.

And with The New York Times reporting June 14 that the “United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself,” it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that sometime soon the corrupt Karzai regime, the Taliban, their ISI paymasters and their American overlords will cozy up and play “let’s make a deal”!

Nor should either project be confused with the failed “secure border” scheme known as the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System or ISIS (there it is again!) or its successor, America’s Shield Initiative. No, that corporatist boondoggle which cost taxpayers some $439 million between 1997 and 2006, eventually morphed into the equally useless Secure Border Initiative or SBInet.

Fully in keeping with the tenor of the times, to wit, that government should get “out of the way” and let business work its magic, DHS’s own Inspector General described the troubled history of the project in critical testimony to Congress. The IG criticized lax practices that led the Department to allow the contractors, led by Boeing Corporation, decide what the system would look like and what technology would be used to build it.

Needless to say, that didn’t work out well! Just this week Washington Technology reported that Boeing “could see its lucrative, but troubled Secure Border Initiative contract scaled back as Homeland Security Department officials consider stopping future construction of the ‘virtual-fence’ security systems along the U.S.-Mexico border.”

Like predecessor ISIS, the $800 million program has suffered from delays, technical glitches and “changes” in direction. In March, Home Sec Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the program was “being re-evaluated as part of an ongoing reassessment.” No matter, with cash in hand Boeing, and a string of disappointed subcontractors, can afford to “move on.”
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After more than a century of popular sci-fi fantasies that feature deadly energy weapons, including War of the Worlds, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Star Trek and Star Wars, it looks like the ray gun has finally arrived in the real world.

ARMY CONCEPT FIELD LASER: The U.S. Army hopes to better protect our troops by fielding in the next few years a mobile, ground-based laser weapon that can zap out of the sky multiple incoming rockets, missiles, or mortars. Live-fire tests of the compact, 100-kilowatt-class, solid-state laser technologys capabilities for precision targeting and area defense missions are to begin by the end of this year.

And even if the first ray guns out of the lab can barely fit on the bed of a 30-ton off-road truck rather than in a soldier’s palm, the novel, “speed-of-light” capabilities that lasers could bring to the battlefield has drawn the keen interest of the Pentagon brass, which spends about $400 million a year on directed-energy beam weapons.

At the end of this year, which marks a half-century of amazing progress in lasers, defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Boeing plan to test-fire a prototype mobile laser weapon against examples of the lethal ordnance—rockets, artillery, mortars—that insurgents in Afghanistan and elsewhere shoot at U.S. troops every day, says Mark Neice, director of the Department of Defense’s High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office in Albuquerque, N.M. As long as such an area-defense system is fed electrical power (from the grid or battery packs), its 100-kilowatt, solid-state, or electric, laser should be able to use its “unlimited magazine” of low-cost shots and ultra-precision tracking/targeting system to zap out of the air multiple inbound munitions from several kilometers away, he explains.

Weapons engineers will use the live-fire tests of the one-micron-wavelength (infrared) beam, which will take place at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, “to validate our notional models of beam propagation,” Neice says. These results, “will allow us to determine what targets we can take on, at what power levels, what ranges and so forth.” The U.S. Army hopes that laser cannons can shield its bases from insurgent attacks while minimizing the risk of collateral damage to the civilian populations among which guerrillas often hide. A cannon’s powerful beam will be able reach out to incoming weaponry, and either detonate, disable or knock them off-course, whereas its ultra-precision aiming capability would presumably enable troops to pick off ground targets without hitting nearby non-combatants.

The U.S. Air Force has in the meantime taken the lead in a project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop even more powerful and compact solid-state lasers that could fit on combat aircraft. Such systems could provide the nation’s air arm with what Michael W. Zmuda, manager of the Air Force Research Lab’s Electric Laser on Large Aircraft (ELLA) program, calls the “game-changing capability” to carry out beyond-the-horizon, air-to-air engagements and precisely targeted, air-to-ground strikes. “It would open up a raft of new tactical and defensive roles, such as defeating targets that are close to our own troops while avoiding collateral damage to civilians and property, as well as a range [of] rapid-response missions against a whole new set of targets,” he says.
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