The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded four contracts to Umbra, Terran Orbital’s PredaSAR unit, Northrop Grumman, and Jacobs to fly synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites in formation. The aim is to demonstrate novel imagery collection techniques and enable the development of new algorithms to process the radar data from multiple satellites. The awards were made under the Distributed Radar Image Formation Technology (DRIFT) program, which is part of DARPA’s Mosaic Warfare vision. Umbra and PredaSAR have been funded under other transaction agreements potentially worth $4.5m and $500,000, respectively, in government funding under Technical Area 1. The DRIFT program was established to take advantage of developments in SAR satellites that have been driven by commercial companies and “offer new opportunities to experiment with novel SAR-related concepts,” DARPA said.
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