Award Data

Next generation ballistic missile warning, defense and surveillance systems need to anticipate, through modeling and simulation, the background radiation of the battlespace environment, including geometries that intercept the ocean background. This objective requires prior knowledge of the environmental radiance conditions for development of optimal sensors and detection approaches. Much work has ...

Propagation Research Associates, Inc., (PRA) proposes to utilize its unique capabilities in atmospheric effects characterization, atmospheric effects mitigation, and track processing to develop multispectral track correlation algorithms to improve boost phase optical-to-radar track correlation for multiple sensor fusion in support of ascent phase intercept of ballistic missiles. PRA proposes to i ...

Silicon wafers oriented on (112) are the preferred substrates for deposition of mercury cadmium telluride layers by molecular beam epitaxy. Surface defects introduced during polishing of the wafers degrade the quality of the epitaxy and the performance of infrared detectors fabricated within these materials. We propose a process for reducing the density of the defects that are inherent in the si ...

Active defects negatively impact the performance of IRFPAs by increasing noise at various levels up to, and including, catastrophic degradation. Evidence indicates that"killer defects"are related to the interaction of open core screw dislocations with impurities that remain after substrate preparation, prior to HgCdTe growth. This impurity diffusion creates a conducting channel that shorts the j ...

For HgCdTe infrared focal plane arrays fabricated on Si substrates, a model has recently been proposed to account for the disparity between the density of failed pixels and the density of dislocations that are present in the HgCdTe junction region. The model distinguishes between active and inactive dislocations and offers a hypothesis that dislocations are active only when they intersect particul ...

With the rapid strides in various avionics-related technologies, the need for advanced simulators will increase. Anti-jam receiver development and future improvements in PNT are critically dependent on the availability of advanced simulators. The needs include: flexible, accurate, adaptable, programmable, user-friendly, hardware in the loop operation, precise wavefront simulation, high dynamics, e ...

To reduce the cost of new hardware development, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is developing fast new computational tools that enable in-the-loop hardware testing. The MDA and contractors have developed high-fidelity scene modeling tools such as the Fast Line-of-sight Imagery for Target and Exhaust-plume Signatures (FLITES) to test optical signature trackers. Currently, these high-speed tools ar ...

Applied Technology Associates (ATA) proposes the development of the stable platform for a new Optical Inertial Reference Unit (OIRU) titled the Space Qualified MSTAR Inertial Reference Unit (MIRU-SQ). The components and functions of an OIRU can be easily split between the stable platform and electronics subsystem. Because of the expensive nature of space qualified design, purchasing, and testing ...

Applied Technology Associates (ATA) proposes the development of the electronics subsystem for a new Optical Inertial Reference Unit (OIRU) titled the Space Qualified MSTAR Inertial Reference Unit (MIRU-SQ). The components and functions of an OIRU can be easily split between the stable platform and electronics subsystem. Because of the expensive nature of space qualified design, purchasing, and t ...

In order to provide the required simulation frame rates we propose to decouple the incident flux calculations from a simple thermal response model. We propose to develop a table-lookup methodology based on high fidelity precomputed environmental and eventually aerothermal fluxes which can be draw in real time to drive the thermal response model. A simple 1-D thermal calculation based on an analyt ...