Phase II year
2023
(last award dollars: 1727271616)
Phase II Amount
$2,498,134
Globally persistent, timely and continuous detection and tracking of missiles and hypersonic vehicles is necessary to protect our nation from these threats. Because of advances in hypersonic vehicle technology, these threats are now more difficult to detect because of their high speed and unpredictable flight paths. To address this urgent need, the Space Development Agency (SDA) has developed a National Defense Space Architecture that incorporates a constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, each of which is equipped with a Wide Field of View Tracking Payload. This Phase II SBIR Program will build and characterize an innovative, low cost, extremely high performance Wide Field of View (WFOV) imager for missile and hypersonic vehicle tracking. The key technical objective of the effort is to demonstrate that WFOV imager delivers the performance that is both predicted and required for the missile and hypersonic vehicle tracking mission. Demonstrating that the imager achieves exceptional performance, when built using standard manufacturing techniques, and measured over the anticipated operating conditions reduces the schedule, cost, and technical risk for the future USSF/SDA Tranche-2 Tracking Layer Program.
