Finding, tracking and monitoring events and activities of interest on a continuous basis remains one of our highest
Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) requirements. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) serve as one of the
warfighter's primary and most responsive means for surveillance and gathering intelligence information and are
becoming vital assets in military operations. This is demonstrated by their significant use in Afghanistan during
Operation Enduring Freedom and in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Lessons learned from these operations
indicate that UAVs provide critical capabilities for enhancing situational awareness, intelligence gathering and force
protection for our military forces. Current UAS high resolution electro-optics offers a small high resolution field of
view (FOV). This narrow FOV is a limiting factor on the utility of the EO system. The UAS that are available offer
persistence; however, the effectiveness of the EO system is limited by the sensors and available processing.
DARPA is addressing this developing the next generation of persistent, very wide area surveillance with the
Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System (ARGUS-IS). The system will be capable of
imaging an area of greater than 40 square kilometers with a Ground Space Distance (GSD) of 15 cm at video rates of
greater than 12 Hz. This paper will discuss the elements of the ARGUS-IS program.
We report for the first time a multichannel in-line PMD compensator which independently provides higher-order PMD compensation for each DWDM channel in the C band. Feedforward compensation is implemented through a robust optimization algorithm using high-speed, high-resolution spectral polarimetric data for each channel. Both 10 and 40 Gb/sec 40-channel 100-GHz compensators are reported, and extensive test results over a range of second-order PMD conditions are presented.
Software has been developed to propagate uniform or non- uniform beams through an optical system using diffraction techniques. The optical system can be divided into regions where geometrical ray tracing is appropriate and regions where diffraction propagation is necessary. This combines the accuracy of diffraction propagation with the speed of geometrical ray tracing to obtain accurate diffraction analyses at any surface in the system in the fastest manner. This software has been incorporated into the CODE VTM optical design program.
Both top-down and bottom-up cost algorithms have been generated for deployable and/or adaptive spaceborne optical systems. These models are anchored in real hardware, and can be used to estimate the cost of deployable optics at various levels of system decomposition. Recently, we have exercised these models to generate NGST cost estimates.
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