OASYS Receives Contract for Advanced Airborne ISR Sensors

Small business qualifier OASYS Technology, LLC, an electro-optical specialty firm in Manchester, NH, received a $10.6 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to develop an “unmanned airborne multispectral sensor suite for more advanced imaging technology in unmanned aerial vehicles.” Work will be performed in Manchester, NH, and is expected to be complete in February 2015. This contract was competitively procured via a broad agency announcement by the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Lakehurst, NJ (N68335-10-C-0064).

These kinds of sensor suites are extremely popular, and several new options are currently in development. The MQ-9 Reaper UAV is just one of several platforms expected to carry the new Gorgon Stare sensor, which goes from a narrow “soda-straw” view to an integrated picture covering several square miles, by using multiple day and night optics. This week, BAE systems also announced successful flight tests of DARPA’s ARGUS-IS (Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System), which packs a 1.8 gigapixel camera that can send up to 92 separate feeds.

(Update: BAE completed its acquisition of OASYS on Oct 20/10.)