DARPA’s ISIS Project Seeks Slow, Soaring Surveillance Superiority (updated)
Related Stories: Americas - USA, Blimps & LTA Craft, Contracts - Awards, Design Innovations, FOCUS Articles, Lockheed Martin, New Systems Tech, Northrop-Grumman, R&D - Contracted, Radars, Raytheon
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DARPA’s ISIS program is developing a stratospheric airship with sensor antennas that will include a radar nearly as large as the airship. This would create a battlefield surveillance platform with extreme endurance, and equally extreme resolution for its air and battlefield scans via radar and other carried sensors. This project is associated with Lockheed’s High Altitude Airship program, which is intended to soar at over 65,000 feet for over a month at a time, and could also play a significant role in ballistic missile and cruise missile defense.
Raytheon describes the radar task alone as: “Imagine a radar antenna that spans the length of a football field, yet weighs less than the 22 players in action on it.” Although it would contain “millions of electronic components,” the thickness of the antenna as envisioned by Raytheon would be about one centimeter (0.4 inch).
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Like all DARPA projects, ISIS is pushing the limits of technology. Critical technology areas requiring further development include low aerial-density advanced airship hull material, bonding systems that will keep the radar attached to a hull with different thermal properties in temperatures that can cycle between 100 degrees F to -110 degrees (40C to -80C), extremely low-power transmit-receive modules for the radars, and novel power systems for long-endurance stratospheric airship operation.
The project is now proceeding into phase 3…
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