Compact Hemispherical Coverage Early Warning Detection and Track Sensor for Multi-Mission Applications

Early Warning Systems (EWS’s) have historically relied on radar technology to scan the skies of protected air space to provide alerts and tracking data of threats.  Many directed energy weapon systems utilize EWS radar for cuing high resolution optical tracker/classifiers that provide aimpoint coordinates for the kill laser.  EWS radar technology is effective, but high resolution full hemispherical surveillance is very costly and often limited by target location errors.  Optical sensor technology, if designed well, has several advantages for EWS that can be implemented at much lower cost, size, and complexity.  The challenge for an optics based EWS technology is to maintain high resolution, wide area surveillance, and rapid update rate all at the same time.  Polaris has developed a novel staring/scanning system that overcomes the issues that have heretofore prevented high resolution hemispherical optical scanners from being fielded.   This Phase II SBIR proposal introduces this novel method and provides a work plan to develop WASS, a Wide Area Surveillance System that provides global Az/El track coordinates of multiple targets over a full hemispherical airspace.  WASS is portable and has high enough resolution to provide early warning of potential threats such as small Class I drones out to 5km radius, protecting potentially vulnerable areas such as sports stadiums, outdoor malls, airports, national security sensitive facilities, shopping malls, oil/gas refineries, and populated troop deployment areas.  There are multiple applications and markets that WASS technology can support.  It is Polaris’ intent to use this SBIR opportunity to develop WASS technology for these military, industrial and commercial applications.