Passive Sensing for Distributed Radars

With new advances, future developments and recent demonstrations by adversaries, in particular new hypersonic glide vehicles threats, there are significant and urgent needs for new sensor and intercept concepts and technologies. Existing monolithic sensors and their current laydown distribution, which are designed to combat minimal energy trajectories, will clearly not meet future challenges. There are also clear needs for new configurations that avoid critical points of failure especially with expected loss of uncontested environments. To satisfy these needs, Arete conceives a new distributed architecture consisting of smart nodes with broad radio frequency (RF) receivers to leverage passive bistatic radar sensing capable of robust computation and communications. In this Phase I Small Business Innovation (SBIR) effort Arete proposes 2 parallel, complimentary research and development efforts with a focus to meet future needs for the Missile Defense Agency mission with new disruptive technologies based on this new concept using new methodologies. Passive, bistatic sensor and processing development leveraging cooperative and noncooperative transmitters to track RF reflections from objects of interest. Develop innovative conceptual architectures of distributed smart receiver nodes utilizing non-cooperative emitters plus some selective cooperative emitters to fill gaps to produce broad coverage to meet future MDA needs. Approved for Public Release | 24-MDA-11906 (16 Sep 24)