February 18, 2019 | International, C4ISR
Goliath grouper, black sea bass, and snapping shrimp, along with bioluminescent plankton and other microorganisms, are set to be the unlikely heroes of DARPA's Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS) program. Five teams of researchers are developing new types of sensor systems that detect and record the behaviors of these marine organisms and interpret them to identify, characterize, and report on the presence of manned and unmanned underwater vehicles operating in strategic waters. This new, bio-centric PALS technology will augment the Department of Defense's existing, hardware-based maritime monitoring systems and greatly extend the range, sensitivity, and lifetime of the military's undersea surveillance capabilities.
DARPA first announced the PALS program in February 2018 with the goal of incorporating biology into new solutions for monitoring adversary movements across the seemingly endless spaces of the world's oceans and seas. Ubiquitous, self-replicating, self-sustaining sea life is adaptable and highly responsive to its environment, whereas maritime hardware is resource intensive, costly to deploy, and relatively limited in its sensing modalities. According to PALS program manager Lori Adornato, “Tapping into the exquisite sensing capabilities of marine organisms could yield a discreet, persistent, and highly scalable solution to maintaining awareness in the challenging underwater environment.”
The DARPA-funded PALS teams must develop or apply technologies to record stimulus responses from observed organisms, and develop combined hardware and software systems that interpret those responses, screen out false positives, and transmit analyzed results to remote end users. The teams' solutions will incorporate technologies such as hydrophones, sonar, cameras, and magnetic, acoustic, and kinetic sensors.
DARPA is also funding the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Division Newport, under principal investigator Lauren Freeman, to develop a seafloor system that uses a hydrophone array and acoustic vector sensor to continuously monitor ambient biological sound in a reef environment for anomalies. The system will analyze changes in the acoustic signals radiated by the natural predator-avoidance response of coral reef ecosystem biota, which could offer an indirect mechanism to detect and classify underwater vehicles in near-real time.
DARPA conceived of PALS as a four-year research program with the expectation that researchers will be able to publish results for review by the broader scientific community. However, if DARPA identifies any of the data, results, or technical specifications as controlled unclassified information, DARPA will require the PALS researchers to protect them to prevent proliferation outside of official channels.
February 1, 2023 | International, Aerospace
The system performed as predicted travelling more than 300 nautical miles and reaching altitudes above 60,000 feet
October 2, 2020 | International, Aerospace
Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — The U.S. State Department cleared $83.5 billion in Foreign Military Sales cases in fiscal 2020, the highest annual total of FMS notifications since the start of the Trump administration. The dollar total — spread over 68 FMS cases notified to Congress — represent an increase of roughly $15 billion over FY19 figures. However, that dollar figure comes with a number of caveats that will lower the overall dollar figure of actual sales when negotiations are complete. FMS notification figures represent potential arms sales that the State Department internally cleared, then passed to Congress through the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. The notifications do not represent final sales; if Congress does not reject the potential sale, it then goes into negotiations, during which dollar figures and quantities of equipment can change. Four key members of Congress, either individually or collectively, have quietly frozen all major U.S. arms sales to Turkey for nearly two years. However, while not solid dollars, notifications are a notable way of tracking interest in American arms from foreign partners, and are seen as a leading indicator of final sales to come. Geographically, the Pacific region led the way with 25 requests totaling $44.1 billion in potential sales. Following that was Europe with 20 requests totaling $21.1 billion; the Middle East with 14 cases totaling $11.5 billion; and Africa with five cases totaling $5.1 billion. Central and South America (three cases) and Canada (one case) each totaled less than $1 billion. July was the busiest month, with 15 announcements worth $32.5 billion, followed by September with nine announcements worth $17.4 billion. Japan was the largest single customer, with five cases worth an estimated $27.9 billion. The second-highest dollar total for one nation was Switzerland — which leads to the biggest caveat from these numbers. FMS deals sometimes never come to fruition, and that is particularly true with two cases included in the FY20 figures: Switzerland and the Philippines. In both cases, the State Department moved to preapprove those nations to buy high-end American technology, even though the governments had not selected the winner of their respective internal competitions. That means that while the Philippines has not decided on its next military helicopter, the U.S. State Department in April announced it cleared potential sales for both AH-1Z helicopters at $450 million and AH-64E Apaches at $1.5 billion. The case was even starker in Switzerland, where the country was cleared this week to purchase both the F/A-18 Super Hornet for $7.45 billion and the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter for $6.58 billion. In both those situations, the country has yet to decide if it will purchase any American system, and will not be purchasing both; a decision to buy from elsewhere in both cases would drop the FMS total by almost $16 billion. https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2020/10/01/us-state-department-cleared-835-billion-in-foreign-military-sales-in-fiscal-2020/
April 8, 2021 | International, Aerospace, Naval
Lightweight RPAS Services Supporting Pollution Response and Multipurpose Maritime Surveillance