Open Call for Innovative Defense-Related Dual-Purpose Technologies/Solutions with a Clear Air Force Stakeholder Need

Warfighters are disadvantaged by a lack of global, persistent, day and night, all weather, satellite surveillance. Meanwhile, adversary threats are becoming more menacing and global. Capella Space, founded in 2016, is a new space company deploying a constellation of 36 commercial Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) smallsats. These satellites collect imagery in all weather and lighting conditions and captures amplitude and phase history enabling the extraction of valuable information such as material properties, moisture content, elevation, and precise changes and movements, not available with optical imagery. Persistent SAR provides a reliable capability to improve situational awareness to protect U.S. and friendly forces anywhere on the globe. It enables the early detection of enemy actions so threats can be degraded, disrupted, or destroyed before they cause harm. The proposed SBIR is a phased program that starts with providing early SAR data for the Air Force’s evaluation and assessment and culminates with two live demonstrations of real-time tasking via our GEO relay, SAR data collection and onboard processing, and rapid direct downlink of SAR data to a user terminal. Capella’s persistent SAR service is a dual use, commercial and military utility, that provides a new game changing capability for monitoring the globe.