DARPA has awarded contracts to four companies, including Umbra and Terran Orbital, to demonstrate the capabilities of synthetic aperture radar satellites flying in formation for improved imagery processing, as part of the DRIFT program aimed at advancing military applications using commercial investments.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded contracts to four companies as part of its Digital Radar Image Formation Technology (DRIFT) program. Umbra and Terran Orbital’s PredaSAR will demonstrate the capabilities of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites flying in formation to improve imagery fusion and processing. Umbra’s contract is valued at up to $4.5 million, while PredaSAR’s is worth $500,000. Northrop Grumman and Jacobs were also granted contracts to process the data collected by these satellites. DARPA aims to explore the use of commercial SAR satellites as nodes in a future system-of-systems for military applications. Todd Master, Umbra’s COO, praised DRIFT as an example of effective government utilization of commercial investments to advance capabilities. Bistatic radar, which uses separate transmitters and receivers, will play a key role in DRIFT, providing unique collection phenomenology and better insights for radar imagery processing.
Source: https://breakingdefense.com/2023/05/darpa-contracts-4-firms-for-drift-radar-imagery-experiments/