Thursday, April 17, 2014

NRO Wants to Place Haloe LIDAR on Spy Sats

Light detection and ranging (lidar), one of the latest sensor technologies to get a boost thanks to the Afghanistan war, could make its way to space.

Lidar could follow in the footsteps of wide-area motion imagery, full-motion video and hyperspectral technologies that have also garnered interest and funding due to their ability to be tested and prove their value in Iraq and Afghanistan.

National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Director Betty Sapp highlighted the High-Altitude Lidar Operational Experiment (Haloe) program as a success for quickly providing three-dimensional, high-resolution mapping of areas in Afghanistan. Though she did not directly say NRO has lidar sensors in orbit, she introduced the Haloe project after noting that her agency often test-flew payloads for satellites in airborne applications to validate them prior to launch.

Developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the payload has been deployed to both Africa and Afghanistan. It was originally deployed on a WB-57 in 2010 to survey 72,000 sq. km of land there. This was roughly 10% of Afghanistan, according to Darpa Director Arati Prabhakar in recent testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

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