3 ms·
Nope, you're wrong. It's not really military. This particular project has been funded for many years by DHS. It's based on radar tech that has been used in m
by mturmon 12y ago
Nope, you're wrong. It's not really military. This particular project has been funded for many years by DHS.
It's based on radar tech that has been used in many past space-based contexts. For synthetic-aperture-radar-based mapping of Earth's topography from space (http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/), for radar science (e.g., looking beneath the surface of Mercury using the 70-m Goldstone radar, http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mercury-20070503_prt.htm http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mercury-2007...), and for precisely retrieving the Doppler shift of receding spacecraft for science and communications. (Source: I know some of the JPL radar group.)
There is military-funded work that goes on at NASA, but this particular radar tech is not such an example.
For (much) more: https://radar.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm https://radar.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
- madengr 12y agoIt's probably pulsed UWB, not SAR as that requires a moving aperature: http://www.timedomain.com/news/wall.php http://www.timedomain.com/news/wall.php UWB has been around for 20+ years, and IIRC there was a big patent dispute back in the late 90's. https://books.google.com/books?id=6_XVg-nX9qgC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=uwb+time+domain+patent&source=bl&ots=9J3p85pZFv&sig=arWdLbskzZwJvHTAWWIpkhr2hqc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=deVLVf7MAojvtQXV54C4Dg&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=uwb%20time%20domain%20patent&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=6_XVg-nX9qgC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA...
- mturmon 12y agoYes, certainly not SAR. My point is there is a big heritage of space-based radar expertise the linked project is drawing on, and I was trying to choose examples that people might be familiar with. SRTM was a main source for the DEMs that people use in GIS.