Award Data

As the orbital space around the earth gets more and more crowded with civilian and military reconnaissance, weather, tracking, communication, and navigation satellites - civilian and military users become increasingly dependent on the services provided by these spacecraft. This situation increases the possibility of offense actions against some or all of these spacecraft. The possibility calls for ...

Because of the maneuvering capabilities of adversaries’ new hypersonic weapons, defensive missiles must fly in very demanding flight regimes, and intercept maneuvers place stringent requirements on interceptor seeker systems. Successfully completing the hit-to-kill end game requires the seeker can either compensate for or perform despite the thermal and optical effects that cause the seeker to m ...

Hazard assessment tools that model the transport and dispersion of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive (CBRNE) materials through urban areas are only as good as the 3D models that inform the physics model. Maintaining accurate, up-to-date 3D models of urban areas is challenging. Even in the commercial world, urban construction and demolition may result in the models created a ...

The objective of this project is to develop a capability to model fracture of materials used in hypersonic vehicles that results from hypervelocity impact while exposed to extreme temperatures. Symplectic Engineering’s approach addresses this challenge at two levels. At the computational level, a Relaxed Extended Finite Element approach is pursued to represent (possibly intersecting) fractures l ...

Recent advances in the hypersonic system capabilities of adversary nations threaten the battlespace supremacy of US forces. Missile defense systems capable of extended high-g maneuvering at stratospheric altitudes and hypersonic Mach numbers will provide the MDA with additional flexibility in defending the US against emerging hypersonic threats. A key enabling technology for the deployment of such ...

The proposed approach provides innovative sensor data association algorithms capable of performing correct data association in multi-target tracking environments with one or more sensors. Current air and missile threats have the ability to fly non-ballistic, highly maneuvering hypersonic trajectories, and the ability to maintain closely spaced trajectories. Improved detection/track association is ...

This STTR research study aims to enhance and apply thermo-mechanically coupled computational models for high-temperature fracture. This topic is particularly challenging in that hypersonic flight in the atmosphere generates extreme conditions over a vehicle that can affect the strength and performance the vehicle materials, both in-flight conditions as well as for cases where the vehicle encounter ...

This topic seeks an innovative NL solution for answering questions that data analysts ask when analyzing data sets to increase efficiency and consistency. The government is working on an all-digital missile defense simulation architecture that will deliver massive amounts of simulation data. Data analysts will soon be inundated with more data than they can possibly analyze manually. A critical par ...

The most direct way to meet the technical objectives for the Secure Virtual Environment (SVE) for Cyber Resiliency Validation would be to replicate the missile defense system’s tactical hardware, software, and network. However, this is cost prohibitive due to the amount of hardware procurement required for the Cyber test environment. Luckily, with the exception of supply chain threats, firmware, ...

Current methods of validating the cyber resiliency of missile defense systems require testing of actual systems, which removes them from operation and subjects them to potentially damaging effects. Cyber ranges can be used as an alternative, but they are limited in scale, costly, time-consuming to configure and have limited capability to model wireless tactical networks and their inherent vulnerab ...