Three years ago, the U.S. military began testing a new drone-mounted sensor designed to auto-spot and track people from 25,000 feet, perfect for searching out insurgents planting improvised bombs in Afghanistan. It gave the sensor the most ominous of names: Vader. And now it looks like the Army has Vader poised to strike.
Vader is short for “Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar,” and the sensor first showed up in Army flight tests in 2009. Now the Army is looking to award a three-year contract to keep Vader’s systems working. That includes engineering support for the sensor’s hardware and software; spare parts and testing tools; training services; and unspecified “materials for updating, maintaining, and sustaining” Vader’s sensor payload. Cue the music.
It’s unclear if Vader has actually made his way to Afghanistan: The Army didn’t return Danger Room’s inquiry by deadline. But it was designed with the Afghanistan war in mind, and the specifics behind its sensor payload show its applicability there. In Afghanistan, U.S. troops are going up against bombsplanted in areas far from the urban environments of Iraq, where bombs were speedily transported around on roads and highways. The Pentagon had already developed a sensor system to track moving vehicles — but not individual, dismounted people. Enter Vader.
Originally developed by the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers at Darpa and built by Northrop Grumman, Vader was designed to spot and track people using two sensors working in combination, mounted to a Grey Eagle drone or manned aircraft, while operating up to an altitude of 25,000 feet and for hours at a time.
Vader tracks you by using a sensor called a “ground moving target indicator,” which spots moving objects and feeds what it sees into a digital map. Next, the system cues a synthetic aperture radar to focus in and take high-resolution photographs. The operators sitting back at Vader’s ground control station get a stream of both still images and a moving, almost real-time map of what’s shuffling around underneath. (It beats tracking people manually.)
Vader can also apparently avoid losing moving objects in the terrain by tracking how those objects cause slight changes in the Doppler effect, which distinguishes moving objects from stationary objects that don’t cause any changes. The whole thing is about five feet long and fits underneath a wing.
It’s also interesting that the Army wants three years of maintenance and support for a man-hunting sensor explicitly designed for Afghanistan. If the sensor really is operating in Afghanistan right now, while the Army is looking at extending support for it, that’s not surprising. The Army is relying on its drones and their sensors — and weapons — more and more. The U.S. hit a record 447 drone strikes in 2012, even as the total number of air strikes declined.
If only they’d do something about Vader’s name. But there’s probably a point to it. It’s not the only shadowy Vader notable for its ability to sense things that others cannot see. LINK
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