Novel Sensing and Detection

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Hubble Telescope takes the clearest images of the universe and transmits these to Earth via its antennas. From 1978 to 1980 DARPA funded the design, fabrication, delivery and installation of two antenna booms for the Hubble Space Telescope to demonstrate the advantages of metal matrix composites.

One of the world’s earliest and most well-known spy satellite programs, the now declassified Corona photo-reconnaissance program, was jointly funded by DARPA and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to ban atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons was abetted by the ARPA program called VELA for developing sensors that can detect nuclear explosions in space, the upper atmosphere, and underground. The first VELA sensors to be deployed, on a pair of satellites launched three days after the 1963 treaty was signed, were designed to monitor for optical and electromagnetic signatures of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere.

ARPA’s TIROS program placed the first dedicated weather satellite, TIROS 1, in orbit on April 1, 1960.

Imaging of Earth from satellites in space has vastly improved in recent years. But the opposite challenge—using Earth-based systems to find, track and provide detailed characterization of satellites and other objects in high orbits—has frustrated engineers even as the need for space domain awareness has grown. State-of-the-art imagery of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO), up to 2,000 km (1,200 miles) high, can achieve resolution of 1 pixel for every 10 cm today, providing relatively crisp details.