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.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Rockwell Collins to develop technologies that might serve as a backup to GPS, the company announced on 17 September.
The research is aimed at reducing warfighter dependence on GPS for modern military operations. It will be conducted under DARPA’s Spatial, Temporal and Orientation Information in Contested Environments (STOIC) programme.
The programme is comprised of three primary elements that, when integrated, have the potential to provide global positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) independent of GPS, including long-range robust reference signals, ultra-stable tactical clocks, and multifunctional systems that provide PNT information between cooperative users in contested environments.
Rockwell Collins will develop innovative techniques and architectures to support communication systems to enable time transfer and positioning between moving platforms without depending on GPS, without any impact on primary communications functionality.
John Borghese, vice president, Rockwell Collins Advanced Technology Center, said: ‘STOIC technology could augment GPS, or it may act as a substitute for GPS in contested environments where GPS is degraded or denied. The time-transfer and ranging capabilities we are developing seek to enable distributed platforms to cooperatively locate targets, employ jamming in a surgical fashion, and serve as a backup to GPS for relative navigation.
‘Future applications of STOIC technology could include a variety of precision relative navigation operations, such as autonomous aerial refuelling and cooperative navigation and collision avoidance within unmanned aerial vehicle swarms. It also could support precise time transfer for networking operations in contested environments.’
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.