What Goes Up, Needn’t Come Down

[LATruth]

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/7241/airuavzephyrflightlg874.jpg

QinetiQ’s Zephyr is a very high-flying, ultra-light solar powered UAV designed to break existing flight length records. It’s one of the contenders in DARPA’s Vulture program (http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/DARPAs-Vulture-What-Goes-Up-Neednt-Come-Down-04852/), which eventually expects to field an aircraft whose flight length will be measured in years.

The platform has also attracted the independent interest of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Lakehurst, NJ, who recently issued a $44.9 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to QinetiQ North America in Arlington, VA for 7 Zephyr UAVs (http://www.qinetiq-na.com/products-zephyr.htm) and 1 ground station. Work will be performed in Farnborough Hampshire, United Kingdom, and is expected to be complete in May 2014. This contract was competitively procured via a Broad Agency Announcement (N68335-09-C-0194).

The DefenseLINK release cites “up to 3 months continuous operation” as the performance goal, which matches DARPA’s Phase 2 goals. On the other hand, DARPA has informed DID that this is not their award, adding that their Vulture program’s Phase 2 contract is not expected until summer 2009 or so.

http://www.darpa.mil/tto/Programs/Vulture.htm

[LATruth]

There was also this little gem.

Look at the highlighted text...

http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/3287/wtfmate.gif

The link was not clickable, I wonder why...

Mathematical Time Reversal ??? WTF :confused:

[LATruth]

And the government has holodecks and they are not sharing!!! I wanna pork Dianna Troy too!!!


The Urban Photonic Sandtable Display (UPSD) program seeks to develop a large holographic display to facilitate rapid and clear communication of intelligence for team-based mission planning and rehearsal, visualization and interpretation of real-time data, and training. Current 3D imaging systems are limited in volume, lack important depth cues, cannot provide aerial accessible images, and can cause stimulator sickness (nausea). The UPSD system will offer a system 3'x3' up to 6'x6' with 12" depth cues and 360° viewing range to enable full team, perspective-correct, collaborative viewing. The light projected autostereoscopic full parallax image will have high spatial resolution that enables realistic surface depiction. The key technical challeneges include the design and fabrication of high precision holographic optics, system design supporting high precision integration, a nd design of the video data pipeline supporting full color 30Hz updates for the 4 to 10 Giga-pixel array.

http://www.darpa.mil/sto/smallunitops/upsd.html

[LATruth]

scary to think about whats not on public record...

[silverhawks]

How about these? :eek:

http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/physci/newphys/program_matter/index.htm


The goal of Programmable Matter Program is to demonstrate a new functional form of matter, based on mesoscale particles, which can reversibly assemble into complex 3D objects upon external command. These 3D objects will exhibit all the functionality of their conventional counterparts.

http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/materials/biomat/engineered/index.htm


The Engineered Bio-Molecular Nano-Devices/Systems (MOLDICE) Program has developed and demonstrated novel hybrid (biotic-abiotic) nanoscale interface technologies that enable direct, real-time conversion of bio-molecular signals into electrical signals. Biological systems exhibit remarkable sensitivity, selectivity, and efficiency that could be exploited in engineering systems should appropriate interfaces become available. Biological systems have well-defined sensing units, signal processing units, and actuation sub-systems that determine responses to specific stimuli. While significant effort has gone into understanding the sensing systems of biology (e.g., receptor and transmembrane proteins), the intra-cellular signal processing system is still the subject of many ongoing research efforts. The objective of this program is to develop hybrid bio-molecular devices/systems that use biological units (e.g., Protein Ion Channels/Nanopores, G-Protein Coupled Receptors, etc.) for performing the sensing function but use silicon circuitry to accomplish the signal processing. Innovative ideas will be explored for the development of interfaces (to ion channels and receptors) that enable the real-time (temporal) transduction of molecular (stochastic) events into electrical signals. A critical focus of this program is the exploitation of temporal (kinetic) information for the real-time analysis and detection of molecular targets.

http://www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/materials/multfunmat/nav/index.htm


The Z-Man Program will develop climbing aids that will enable an individual soldier to scale vertical walls constructed of typical building materials without the need for ropes or ladders. The inspiration for these climbing aids is the technique by which geckos, spiders, and small animals scale vertical surfaces, that is, by using unique biological material systems that enable controllable adhesion using van der Waals forces or by hooking surface asperities. This program seeks to build synthetic versions of those material systems and then utilize them in a novel climbing aid optimized for use by humans. The overall goal of the program is to enable an individual soldier using dry adhesive climbing aides to scale a vertical surface at 0.5 m/s while carrying a combat load.

[silverhawks]

And the government has holodecks and they are not sharing!!! I wanna pork Dianna Troy too!!!

Coming soon to a decade near you.

http://www.i-cocoon.com/

[silverhawks]

The link was not clickable, I wonder why...

Mathematical Time Reversal ??? WTF :confused:

Don't you just love the internet? ;P (http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:C9Z9mL1ZXSQJ:www.darpa.mil/dso/thrusts/math/appliedcompmath/mtr/index.htm+Mathematical+Time+Reversal&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)


Mathematical time reversal methods are based on the premise that if one can reverse a signal, it can then be traced back to its source, somewhat like playing a movie backwards to see its beginning. By reversing a signal, one can follow its path and fit it to a model to decipher it. In transmitting a signal such as “hello” from a transmitter to a receiver array, each element of the receiver array records and transmits a time-reversed (last in, first out) version of the signal, i.e., "olleh". But the signal can stray down multiple paths and become distorted between the transmitter and the receiver so that the simple "hello" becomes noise due to interference.

Sensors and the processing associated with them generally rely on the idea of a direct path between the sensor and a specific target. Targets can be hidden under trees, or buried as in the case of mines. Detecting and tracking targets in these highly cluttered environments is challenging because the signal from the object of interest is weak and is contaminated by multiple scattering from the environment.

However, if one time reverses the signal received in the presence of multiple scattering, both the location of the transmitter and the message are revealed. In lieu of transmitting the signal from the receivers, the signals are stored and mathematically retransmitted to form an image of the transmitter. The goal of the Mathematical Time Reversal Program is to develop and extend this novel approach to the inverse problem to exploit multiple scattering and the underlying physics behind it in order to estimate the propagation channel and extract an image of a target from the surrounding clutter. Potentially, this approach may enable the ability to detect targets under the tree canopy; find buried mines, caves, and bunkers; localize acoustic sources; and as a result communicate with greater bandwidth in urban environments and the ocean.

During the first phase of this program, several time reversal target detection methods were developed. These methods achieved high probability of detection with low false alarm rates in highly cluttered environments where conventional processing methods failed to detect the presence of targets in both simulation and with actual data. In the second phase of the program, the detection methods are being extended to image targets in highly cluttered environments where conventional Synthetic Aperture Radar and tomographic methods fail. A preliminary finding during this phase of the program was that images produced employing time reversal methods contain information from portions of the target that are not directly illuminated.

Mathematical Research Group for Time Reversal (http://math.uci.edu/~zhao/time_reversal/index.html)

Time Reversal (http://discovermagazine.com/1992/oct/timereversal140)

[LATruth]

Coming soon to a decade near you.

http://www.i-cocoon.com/

I want one in my living room, stat.