Australia looks towards space with force restructure, investment and training
Australia is looking to improve its presence in space with a focus on communications and creating a dedicated segment of its defence forces committed to the domain.
Raytheon BBN Technologies has announced that it has been awarded a contract by the US Air Force Research Laboratory under the Force Protection programme. The contract, worth $1.9 million, was announced 8 May, 2012.
Under the contract, Raytheon BBN will enhance the force protection kit – networks of sensors that are used to alert troops to potential dangers - for the programme in a number of ways, with a platform to extend the reach of the kits, particularly for mobile and dismounted troops.
According to the company, it will conduct work to ‘enable force protection kits to use sensors that are beyond their immediate line-of-sight, giving troops on patrol and commanders outside the immediate reach of the force protection kits access to data from more distant sensors’. They will also carry out collaborative work to develop adaptations so that troops have greater protection when they are outside their bases or vehicles.
The company said it will also carry out work on automatic archiving, to make collected data more immediately searchable and retrievable for review purposes; as well as adding tagging, retrieval and search applications to video, traditional text, and image data. In addition, the new platform will ‘support information ferrying to and from remote locations via unmanned aerial vehicles’ in situations where sending information by satellite is too slow.
Raytheon said its work will help troops to access information, and improve their reach-back to command and control centres, ‘helping them to make more informed decisions and enabling better mission planning and threat responses’.
Australia is looking to improve its presence in space with a focus on communications and creating a dedicated segment of its defence forces committed to the domain.
The Portuguese company’s naval communications system is in service across more than a dozen countries. It has turned to its home nation for support in developing a new vehicle based C2 system.
The Vision4ce Deep Embedded Feature Tracking (DEFT) technology software is designed to process video and images by blending traditional computer vision with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to present actionable information from complex environments.
Persistent Systems has been cleared by National Security Agency (NSA) to transmit sensitive data on commercial networks. The devices are added to the NSA’s Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) component list which also includes other companies’ products providing the same security.
The release of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) has been long promised as mid-year. It is possible it could be as early as 2 June although the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) continues to play its cards close to its chest.
Intelsat outlines how its multi-orbit SATCOM architecture is enhancing connectivity and resilience for special operations forces operating in degraded and contested environments.