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Foliage Penetrating Radar Matures

Not that long ago the U.S. military lacked an ability to detect and pinpoint vehicles, buildings, and other targets, like missile launchers, in broad areas of dense forest and wooded terrain

Seeking to address this critical deficiency the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army’s Communications-Electronics Research Development and Engineering Center’s Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate, in the late 1990s, enlisted Lockheed Martin to develop a novel, foliagepenetrating synthetic aperture radar, known as FOPEN.

With today’s U.S. Army-led Tactical Reconnaissance and Counter-Concealment Enabled Radar program, or TRACER, the legacy FOPEN radar system continues to grow in capability, application, and reliability while continuous research and technology improvements have shrunk size, weight, and power consumption.

The TRACER system builds upon the FOPEN technology advancements by not only shrinking and modernizing the radar, but also by configuring it for unmanned endurance aircraft. These technology advances, coupled with lessons learned from ongoing FOPEN operations, have contributed to new concepts of operations for the system, as well. [Download]