A-TECH CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF161-036

Description

ABSTRACT: ATA will develop the Bright Star illuminator concept to mitigate speckle and scintillation by applying spectrally diverse, high brightness, fiber laser technology, in a spatially diverse transmitter array, to afford optimal, configurable, power scaling, relevant to the range requirements for specific tracking and Intelligence Sensing and Reconnaissance (ISR) objectives.The Air Force is seeking methods, hardware approaches, and laboratory demonstration concepts to mitigate speckle and scintillation noise observed in relevant actively illuminated tracking.The Bright Star research will demonstrate that speckle and scintillation mitigation can be achieved without the need for temporal averaging, thereby enabling the highest possible tracking bandwidth.Bright Star will leverage the wavelength dependence of speckle and scintillation to develop a modeling approach for our hardware concept development that affords frame rate independent mitigation of speckle and scintillation noise.ATAs innovative approach leverages commercially available Super Continuum White Light fiber laser technology.Exploiting Super Continuum fiber laser technology affords a high-value, low-risk, rapid technical maturation approach to validate spectral diversity efficiency in reducing speckle and scintillation noise.; BENEFIT: Bright Star has many anticipated benefits.It leverages commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware to reduce risk and expedite experimental validation.Temporal independence of diversity ensures frame rate independent speckle and scintillation mitigation.Our sub-aperture redundancy enables power scaling, phase and spatial diversity.Variable divergence optimizes the range dependent footprint and our independent sub-aperture pointing enables footprint control with wide field ISR.ATA has been developing technology for the U.S. Government and Aerospace contractors since 1975.During this time, we have developed outstanding relationships that we will leverage to bring the Bright Star technology to market.ATAs success in generating additional revenue tied to our Phase I and Phase II SBIR projects has allowed ATA to grow and expand its business through Phase III commercialization and other spin-off contracts.As reported in the ATA Company Commercialization Report, we have received 58 Phase I SBIR awards and 25 Phase II awards.ATAs track record for commercialization of SBIR sponsored technology development is excellent, resulting in a Commercialization Achievement Index of 90 and related cumulative revenues from sales and additional investments of over $42 million.ATA will work to insert our Bright Star technology into the Department of Defense (DoD) High Energy Laser Weapon System market.DoD investment for this technology area is annually over $400M and industry also invests a substantial amount on Internal Research and Development.In the out years, as these systems are deployed investments could reach several billion dollars.Potential applications include missions having complex extended targets and/or severe aero-optical or deep turbulence disturbance.