Active Terahertz Imager for Covert Navigation Assist

The global war on terror has dramatically changed the environment in which today's warfighter operates. Many of the locations in theater require moving troops and equipment into areas with unimproved landing zones. Loss of situational awareness in degraded visual environments is one of the largest threats to rotary wing aircraft operating in these areas. Phase Sensitive Innovations has built a passive millimeter wave distributed aperture imaging (DAI) system operating that can image at 10 fps without any moving parts. The frequency of operation (and resultant resolution) of this system is currently limited by the practical availability of low noise amplifiers. We propose building a real time active "see-through" imaging system operating above 100 GHz leveraging the distributed aperture with optical up-conversion approach used in previous imagers. This system would use a broad band antenna design coupled with multiple active sources to tune the dust penetration (and covertness) and resolution for the situation, as well as mitigate coherent effects such as speckle. The DAI advantages of thin, lightweight, and conformable would allow for easier integration onto the aircraft. Finally, the optical upconversion allows for video rate capture of the THz scene on a standard near IR camera.