Award Data

The Airborne Laser (ABL) program has significant cooling requirements that until present can only be addressed by mechanical refrigeration systems. These include cooling of the various high powered solid state lasers currently used on the ABL for tracking and ranging as well as standby cooling for the basic hydrogen peroxide (BHP) loops on the Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL). The proposed inte ...

Intense dynamic and thermal loads will occur during stage-separation events that are of major concern from both operational and safety viewpoints. The insensitive-munitions (IM) stimuli and thermal/dynamic response associated with such events has received very little attention, yet this is of major concern for the KEI vehicle undergoing Stage 1 to Stage 2 separation. The KEI event is at lower alti ...

Propulsion systems may perform a variety of maneuvers during the ascent phase of flight that can impact the performance of an interceptor or other parts of an MDA system designed to perform threat detection, discrimination, and tracking. Our Phase I effort focuses on building on extending existing plume signature software. A main technical objective is to establish the various components and app ...

Modeling of missile plume signature emissions play a crucial role in supporting system-oriented studies in a number of important areas related to detection and identification of the rocket motor during high altitude maneuvers. Examples of these areas include early warning systems, post launch warning detection, missile typing algorithms, discrimination and background clutter discrimination. The g ...

Characteristics of missile plume signature emissions have a great potential to enhance defensive capabilities in a number of important areas related to Ballistic Missile Defense Systems (BMDS). Supporting MDA’s engineering applications related to missile typing, discrimination, tracking, algorithm development, etc. requires estimation of many parameters by the plume models, which can be very exp ...

Our Phase I research involved the development of an innovative sensor scheduling algorithm in support of Ballistic Missile Defense. This algorithm schedules multiple diverse and distributed sensors to perform time-critical tasks relating to multiple moving targets; specifically, to detect, classify, localize, track, support the interception of, and conduct BDA for ballistic missiles throughout t ...

The project objective is to develop a tracking algorithm that will fuse detections and tracks provided by a network of radar sensors with detections and tracks provided by a network of electro-optical (EO) sensors into multi-system tracks. The intent is to thereby achieve increased state estimation and classification accuracy in tracking ballistic missiles. Both target kinematic states and featur ...

MDA is currently developing advanced interceptors for its BMDS. Imaging technology is crucial to this effort for several purposes, including navigation, false-alarm/decoy identification, and estimation of position and speed of potential targets. Although high-resolution imaging systems are readily available, these require (1) power-hungry CMOS arrays (or FPAs) and (2) large-aperture optics, whic ...

The primary objective of this Phase I program will be to demonstrate a greatly improved manufacturing and production techniques for die packaging of anti-tamper capabilities. We aim to show through manufacture engineering research, software development and hardware prototypes, a new low-cost technique for multi-threat capable Anti-Tamper (AT) device manufacture and AT software-based multi-threat ...

The primary focus of Phase II is to undertake a disciplined product development of a new Anti-Tamper technology of very thin foils that can detect both physical tampering and a broad range of magnetic/EM/RF based (non-contact) probing. This program will conclude with affordable and reliable manufacture of devices that can meet avionic and shipboard platform systems electronics integration specifi ...