SHOT - Sensor for Hypersonic Object Tracking

Recent demonstration of hypersonic missiles by American adversaries poses a significant threat to the US. These missiles can evade early warning systems since they cruise at a lower altitude, are highly maneuverable, travel over five times the speed of sound, and have a very low radar cross section. In the past few years there has been increasing interest in developing new EO/IR sensors to detect such missiles.  Due to their high velocity, they develop a hot plasma around them, with the nose cone and leading edges often becoming hotter than 1500C. Such hot surfaces provide a good thermal signature providing opportunity for novel EO/IR sensors to be developed.  Hypersonic missile early detection requires a highly sensitive wide area EO/IR sensor, identification requires a high resolution sensor, and tracking requires very low latency readout. Having all these features in a single imaging sensor is very difficult. For example, a large format 2K x 2K SWIR or MWIR infrared focalplane array imaging at rates required for tracking (20KHz frame rate) would dissipate over 200W of power, while traditional cooling methods can only handle focalplane arrays with at most a few watts of power dissipation. Moreover, such a FPA will produce 80 billion pixel/second data rate that cannot be handled by contemporary processors to detect and track the missile. SAAZ has been developing neuromorphic event-based readout EO/IR sensor technology that alleviates the above issues, offering the following advantages: In pixel detection of temporal contrast to reduce processing load  Asynchronous readout reduces data rate while maintaining very low latency for tracking  Increase probability of detection Reduce false alarm rate Sensor and processor compatibility enhancement Efficient Algorithms Optimized band  Radiation hardened ROIC and electronics suitable for space The ongoing developments offer a good foundation for starting the work on this Navy SBIR. Under this SBIR SAAZ proposes to add the use case to detect and track a hypersonic missile in its glide phase to terminal phase transition, as follows: To study the phenomenology of the glide phase and the terminal phase, especially developing a radiometric model for the transition between these phases  To develop a model that compares the performance by using a single EO/IR band with respect to several bands provide cost-benefit analysis  Conduct preliminary design of an optimal event driven neuromorphic sensor for the intended use case Develop a plan for sensor demonstration (field test) under phase II and develop a productization strategy to transition the technology to a program of record  The proposed multi EO/IR sensor event-based neuromorphic technology with embedded AI algorithms will greatly enhance Navy’s capabilities in protecting platforms against hypersonic missile threats.