Stealth Saga #50

MQ-25 Stingray:

The USN has made it official that the new tanker drone will be the MQ-25a Stingray instead of CBARS.

Fifth Generation Fighters:

Why the 5th gen is so critical to aerial combat these days.

TFX:

Pakistan may be interested in buying the Turkish TFX fighter.

ATD-X/X-2/F-3:

Boeing and Lockheed are turning out to be rivals over the Japanese F-3 fighter program.

J-20:

More J-20s have started appearing on the flight line.

PAK-DA:

WiB argues, rightly, its highly unlikely the next Russian bomber will be a near space, hypersonic monster as described by the Russian media.

 The National Interest is also mocking the Russian media's pronouncements.

However, the Russians might actually be trying to get the Chinese to buy into the program.

PAK-FA:

Russia continues to claim to be testing sixth gen fighter components on the PAK-FA prototype 5th gen fighters.

WiB claims the PAK-FA is roughly comparable to the F-22.

B-21:

The USAF has not decided on how many B-21s it will need and will not do so until after the aircraft is done with development.  The reason being the global situation in the 2020s may be better  than now...or worse.

F-22:

What does the F-22 look like through a thermal imaging system?

F-35:

The USAF is comfortable with sending the F-35A to war by year's end.

The modifications to the F-35A so the USAF can declare IOC are complete.

The USMC sees the Small Diameter Bomb II as a priority upgrade to the F-35. 

The F-35 deployments to Britain as part of the airshows have been testing ALIS, the software for maintenance. 

Israel is considering buying the F-35B.

Elbit Systems is looking to provide training systems for the F-35.

Will the Turkish coup attempt cause a problem in the F-35 program?  However, Lockheed has confirmed the F-35s for Turkey are in the early stages of production.

The British airshows have been welcome PR for the F-35.

WiB still hates the F-35.

ATAC calls the F-35B very 'Raptor-ish' in how it fights air to air. 

Here are some photos of the F-35B at the Red Flag exercise.

Lockheed has stated the F-35 is underfunded and apparently its cash flow is hurt by the delays in the negotiations for the next batches of F-35s.

META:

British Aerospace has developed a laser sensor for determining air speed, doing away with the pivot tube.

Stealth Saga #3: China and Russia and Drones! Oh My!

A satellite image of China's "Divine Eagle" drone.  This is generally thought to be a Global Hawk equivalent, but reports have been arising that its a stealth aircraft hunter.

More information is coming out about the stealth aircraft hunting drones being developed by China (Divine Eagle) and Russia.

Beijing A-Star Science and Technology has new sensors for the J-20 and J-31.

There is a claim the J-20 will enter service in 2017.

The PAK-FA's radar is supposed to be close to ready for mass manufacture.

The Russians  showed off the PAK-FA at the MAKS 2015 airshow (video at the link).

In fact, there's LOTS of buzz about the PAK-FA.  That's not a great sign.  IMO, when Russia starts pushing something hard like that in the buzzosphere, it means there are issues. 

There's more news from MAKS, but especially note the Zond Project.  Three notes: the Russians seem to have run out of original names like the Americans have.  The AWACS radar on a drone is something we Americans ought to be doing.  Finally, this is, as far as I can tell, just another model.  When we see something flying is to stand up and take interest.

The first F-22s have arrived in Europe to reassure the Europeans and defend against the Russians.

B-2 bombers are back in Guam.

The F-35 will face off in tests against the A-10.  The US Air Force is against it, but the Pentagon on high has ordered it.

A Taiwanese site discusses the B-3/Long Range Strike Bomber in the context of a conflict with China.

Popular Mechanics speculates what the  6th generation fighters the US Air Force and US Navy are working on will be like.

Japan is trying to tune its stealth fighter project to take into account China's advances in their own stealth designs.

Europe is said to be playing catch-up in drone technology according to the Financial Times as they discuss the Neuron and Tarranis drones.

Raytheon AN/SPY-6 Radar Easily Passes CDR

The U.S. Navy and Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) have completed the AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) critical design review. The outcome confirms Raytheon's design and technologies as mature, producible and low risk; on track to meet all radar performance requirements, on schedule and within cost.

The CDR assessed all technical aspects of the program, from hardware specifications, software development, risk mitigation and producibility analysis, to program management, test and evaluation schedules, and cost assessments. The review concluded with Navy stakeholders impressed with the radar's progress to date and confident in the program's path forward to on-time delivery.

"This successful milestone is the culmination of our team's unwavering focus on continuous technology maturity, risk mitigation and cost reduction throughout all phases of development," said Raytheon's Kevin Peppe, vice president of Integrated Defense Systems' Seapower Capability Systems business area. "With customer validation in hand, we will now advance production, driving toward the ultimate – and timely – delivery of this highly capable and much-needed integrated air and missile defense radar capability to the DDG 51 Flight III destroyer."

link.

Robopocalypse: can we Create new Senses for Human Beings?

Prototype Quantum Radar Built

A prototype quantum radar that has the potential to detect objects which are invisible to conventional systems has been developed by an international research team led by a quantum information scientist at the University of York.

The new breed of radar is a hybrid system that uses quantum correlation between microwave and optical beams to detect objects of low reflectivity such as cancer cells or aircraft with a stealth capability. Because the quantum radar operates at much lower energies than conventional systems, it has the long-term potential for a range of applications in biomedicine including non-invasive NMR scans.

The research team led by Dr Stefano Pirandola, of the University's Department of Computer Science and the York Centre for Quantum Technologies, found that a special converter - a double-cavity device that couples the microwave beam to an optical beam using a nano-mechanical oscillator - was the key to the new system.

The device can either generate microwave-optical entanglement (during the signal emission) or convert a microwave into an optical beam (during the collection of the reflection beams from the object). The research is published in Physical Review Letters.

link.

to Skin a Cyborg

Some high-tech prosthetic limbs can be controlled by their owners, using nerves, muscles, or even the brain. However, there’s no way for the wearer to tell if an object is scalding hot, or about to slip out of the appendage’s grasp.

Materials that detect heat, pressure, and moisture could help change this by adding sensory capabilities to prosthetics. A group of Korean and U.S. researchers have now developed a polymer designed to mimic the elastic and high-resolution sensory capabilities of real skin.

The polymer is infused with dense networks of sensors made of ultrathin gold and silicon. The normally brittle silicon is configured in serpentine shapes that can elongate to allow for stretchability. Details of the work are published today in the journal Nature Communications.

link.

Steps to Brain Upgrade Implants

In a study in the journal Neuron, scientists describe a new high data-rate, low-power wireless brain sensor. The technology is designed to enable neuroscience research that cannot be accomplished with current sensors that tether subjects with cabled connections.

Experiments in the paper confirm that new capability. The results show that the technology transmitted rich, neuroscientifically meaningful signals from animal models as they slept and woke or exercised.

"We view this as a platform device for tapping into the richness of electrical signals from the brain among animal models where their neural circuit activity reflects entirely volitional and naturalistic behavior, not constrained to particular space," said Arto Nurmikko, professor of engineering affiliated with the Brown Institute for Brain Science and the paper's senior and corresponding author. "This enables new types of neuroscience experiments with vast amounts of brain data wirelessly and continuously streamed from brain microcircuits."

The custom-engineered neuroelectronic platform is composed of two elements: a 100-channel transmitter only 5 centimeters in its largest dimension and weighing only 46.1 grams, and a four-antenna receiver that looks like a home Wi-Fi router but employs sophisticated signal processing to maximize the transmitter's signal while the subject is moving around. Via a small port embedded in a subject's skull, the transmitter connects to a tiny implanted electrode array that detects the activity of scores of neurons in the cortex. The wireless transmitter is compatible with multiple types and classes of brain sensors, Nurmikko said, with a view toward future sensor development

link.

China Claims new JY-26 Phased Array RADAR has Tracked F-22

China has unveiled a new counter stealth radar that can detect and track stealth aircraft like America's famed F-22 Raptor fighter jet.

The new phased array named JY-26 was showcased at the 10th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai that concluded Sunday, along with four other Chinese radar systems: the YLC-20, the YLC-2V, the YLC-8B and the JY-27A.

Designed to detect fifth-generation stealth fighters, the JY-26 phased array radar is capable of high accuracy, target tracking, and separation, and can operate up to a range of 500 kilometers, according to the manufacturer.

Chinese media reported recently that the JY-26 radar had spotted an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter -- the United States' most advanced stealth fighter -- when it flew over South Korea during a recent military exercise.

link.

Grabbing the Robopocalypse: Fingertip Sensor Allows Robots to Pick up, Plug in USB Cables

Researchers at MIT and Northeastern University have equipped a robot with a novel tactile sensor that lets it grasp a USB cable draped freely over a hook and insert it into a USB port.

The sensor is an adaptation of a technology called GelSight, which was developed by the lab of Edward Adelson, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science at MIT, and first described in 2009. The new sensor isn't as sensitive as the original GelSight sensor, which could resolve details on the micrometer scale. But it's smaller — small enough to fit on a robot's gripper — and its processing algorithm is faster, so it can give the robot feedback in real time.

Industrial robots are capable of remarkable precision when the objects they're manipulating are perfectly positioned in advance. But according to Robert Platt, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern and the research team's robotics expert, for a robot taking its bearings as it goes, this type of fine-grained manipulation is unprecedented.

"People have been trying to do this for a long time," Platt says, "and they haven't succeeded because the sensors they're using aren't accurate enough and don't have enough information to localize the pose of the object that they're holding."

link.

DARPA Wants Vast Oceanic Monitoring Network

Probably one of the last and perhaps unforgiving areas of the world not truly “wired” is above and below the ocean.

Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) want to explore the possibility of seriously changing that notion and develop what it calls “a system-of-systems architecture and critical components to support networked maritime operations, to include undersea, surface, and above surface domains.”

link.

Chinese Radar be Able to "See" F-35 Stealth Technology

Increasingly sophisticated radar in China and Russia may soon be able to pierce the stealth armor on F-22 and F-35 fighter jets, according to a news report.

The stealth coating on the U.S.-made fifth-generation fighters shields the aircraft from high-frequency radars operating in the Ku, X and C bands and some of the S band, but not from low-frequency systems utilizing L, UHF and VHF wavelengths, according to an article by Dave Majumdar at USNI News.

China and Russia are now developing low-frequency radars with more computing power designed to track stealth aircraft with more precision — enough to target with a missile, according to the report, citing an unnamed former senior U.S. Navy official.

“Acquisition and fire control radars are starting to creep down the frequency spectrum,” the official told USNI News. “I don’t see how you long survive in the world of 2020 or 2030 when dealing with these systems if you don’t have the lower frequency coverage.”

To be sure, the Defense Department is aware of the increasing sophistication of enemy air defenses, known in military parlance as anti-access, area-denial, or A2-AD, environments.

link.

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.

link.

Ecology From the air

KJ500 AWACS Prototype Spotted

link.

Path to an Unjammable RADAR?

Jamming radar signals is an increasingly sophisticated affair. There are various techniques such as drowning the radar frequency with noise or dropping chaff to create a false reflection. But the most advanced radar systems can get around these ruses.

So a more sophisticated idea is to intercept the radar signal and modify it in a way that gives false information about the target before sending it back. That’s much harder to outsmart.

But today, Mehul Malik and pals at the University of Rochester in New York state demonstrate a way to do it.

These guys base their technique on the quantum properties of photons and in particular on the fact that any attempt to measure a photon always destroys its quantum properties.

So their idea is to use polarized photons to detect and image objects. Reflected photons can of course be used to build up an image of the object. But an adversary could intercept these photons and resend them in a way that disguises the object’s shape or makes it look as if it is elsewhere.

However, such a process would always change the quantum properties of the photons such as their polarization. And so it should always be possible to detect such interference. “In order to jam our imaging system, the object must disturb the delicate quantum state of the imaging photons, thus introducing statistical errors that reveal its activity,” say Malik and co.

That’s more or less exactly how quantum key distribution for cryptography works. The idea here is that any eavesdropper would change the quantum properties of the key and so reveal his or her presence. The only difference in the quantum imaging scenario is that the “message” is sent and received by the same person.

Malik and co have tested their idea by bouncing photons off an aeroplane-shaped target and measuring the polarization error rate in the return signal. Without any eavesdropping the system easily imaged the aeroplane.

But when an adversary intercepted the photons and modified them to send back an image of a bird, the interference was easy to spot, say Malik and co.

That’s an impressive demonstration of the first imaging system that is unjammable thanks to quantum mechanics.