Award Data

FIRST RF will lead the Phase II effort and will leverage the system architecture of the MAINLINE system and integrate multifunctional SiGe integrated circuits (ICs) developed by The University of California San Diego under the supervision of Prof. Gabriel Rebeiz. The SiGe devices developed during the Phase II effort will significantly reduce the power requirements of the MAINLINE system allowing f ...

Space superiority requires space protection and space situational awareness (SSA), which rely on rapid and accurate space object behavioral and operational intent discovery. The presence of adversaries in addition to real-time and hidden information constraints greatly complicates the decision-making process in controlling both ground-based and space-based Air Force surveillance assets. The focus ...

The problem addressed in this effort is to automatically learn historical ephemeris space catalog time, position, and velocity entity track update error uncertainties (i.e., without track error covariances) and to automatically (e.g., without expert event labeling) produce: – unmodeled non-gravitational space catalog update flags – abnormal unmodeled catalog update flags with abnorma ...

Successful completion of this Phase II proposal will fully characterize and evaluate a material for use in RF windows on hypersonic flight vehicles. Phase II will specifically examine the materials suitability through RF testing in X, Ku, and Ka bands and at elevated temperatures to 2000°F. The desired outcome will be a material with predictable, repeatable dielectric properties over frequency ...

Target detection and recognition is a challenging problem because of changes in appearance, viewing direction, occlusion and other covariates. Systems that can accurately and efficiently detect and track objects can provide several benefits in surveillance, monitoring and other applications. As part of this effort, we propose to develop a robust learning-based approach to detect, track and recogni ...

Through the execution of our Phase 1 effort, Nutronics, Inc. and Montana State University developed an improved means to optimize the Pellizzarri cost functional for coherent imaging using digital holography. Our algorithm developed during the Phase 1 effort accelerates convergence times by a factor of 20-40 for the majority of scenarios evaluated. Our proposed Phase 2 effort has a two-fold focus: ...

Training can now be delivered on a large scale through emerging platforms, but training must be engaging to be effectively utilized. Key to providing training that makes a difference in the field is an understanding of how to induce high levels of engagement during learning and the ability to objectively assess engagement in real-time so that interventions can be tailored during training to optimi ...

Current continuous wave (CW) and pulse mid-wave infrared (MWIR) lasers have design and performance limitations that constrain their usability in some critical Air Force applications. There is an important need to create a new class of MWIR laser sources with less drawbacks and higher pulse energies and CW powers. The proposed work will demonstrate the technical feasibility of an innovative MWIR la ...

Accurate and timely surveillance of objects in the near-Earth space environment is becoming increasingly critical to US national security. One of the main difficulties in this domain is efficiently and accurately modeling trajectories of the vast number of objects in orbit around the Earth. The orbital trajectory of a single object is typically modeled as a second-order system of equations which ...

Space surveillance is the component of space situational awareness focused on the detection of resident space objects (RSOs) and the use of multisource data to track and identify space objects. While the propagation of the states of RSOs has been investigated extensively over the last fifty years, the correct propagation of their covariance or the more general (non-Gaussian) probability distribut ...