Optical Early Warning System for Hemispherical Sky Surveillance

Early Warning Systems (EWS's) have historically relied on radar technology to scan the skies of protected air space and provide alerts and tracking data of objects penetrating that protected air space. Many directed energy weapon system designs utilize radar for cuing high resolution optical tracker/classifiers, which may also provide aim point for the weapon system. Radar based early warning systems are often limited by target location errors, have long handover latency times, and can be very large and costly, particularly for wide area surveillance. Optical sensor technology has several advantages for wide area surveillance that may be exploited to provide a lower cost, higher performing EWS for directed energy weapon systems.   Polaris Sensor Technologies proposes to design both a visible (day-only) and an infrared (day/night) hemispherical EWS. The designs will proceed from a trade study that involves combinations of staring and scanning optical sensors. The objective of the design is to leverage the latest and early emerging optical sensor and processing technology to generate designs that are optimal from a fundamental physics/technology perspective. The design space will be presented to the government customer and a final design that is a logical trade between SWAP-C and performance will be selected for Phase II development.