Long-Range Passive Surveillance in Anti-Access/Area-Denial Environments - Phase II

Operations in high-threat environments drive both our own forces, as well as our adversaries, to effectively go dark by limiting detectable emissions. In such situations, long-range situational awareness provided by radar and SIGINT/ELINT systems is lost. However, in most of these environments, particularly those in littoral regions, many other electromagnetic emissions are present from other sources, including commercial ships, land-based emitters, and even satellites. In principle, an airborne platformÆs mission radar could use these emissions to maintain situational awareness by processing the reflections of these emissions from surrounding ships. However, this requires that not only the opportunistic emission is in the operating band of the mission radar (typically x-band), but also be suitable for the radar function (detection/tracking or imaging). This requirement is highly restrictive. On the other hand, modern SIGINT/ELINT collection systems operate over a very wide-frequency range and have wide-instantaneous bandwidth processing capabilities, making them an excellent passive radar system in A2/AD environments where opportunistic emissions may be the only means to develop and maintain a long-range surface picture. Azure Summit Technology, Inc. (Azure)Āwill develop passive surveillance techniques that use the array signal processing capabilities of modern signals intelligence/electronic intelligence (SIGINT/ELINT) systems to act as a passive radar system leveraging opportunistic emitters in the operational area to develop and maintain the tactical surface picture in Anti-Access/Area-Denial (A2/AD) environments. We will then apply real-time digital channelization and detection to produce raw pulse detection words. This is followed by deinterleaving and scan synchronization algorithms to identify and cluster those pulses associated with a unique emitter. The resulting pulses are fed into our advanced multi-channel statistical processor that detects the bounce-path signal and produces estimates of delay, Doppler, and angle of arrival. Azure will work with a sensor subcontractor to plan and conduct ground and airborne data collections in representative signal environments. ĀWe will process the sensor data to validate that the processing meets performance objectives, as well to characterize the performance envelope in terms of operational parameters.