The Michigan lab that introduced the notion of beetle-generated power for remote-controlled, insect-borne reconnaissance sensors is back—this time with an idea to generate energy from low-frequency ambient sound.
A U.S. Air Force detachment will be sent to Poland this year, marking the first time that U.S. forces will be based on Polish soil. The detachment, which will consist of a dozen airmen, will assist Poland with training for its C-130s and F-16s. The agreement on stationing troops came out of a meeting in late July between Poland's minister of national defense, Tomasz Siemoniak, and U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
The U.S. Navy, planning for next-generation antiship missiles, detailed on page DT4, uses the term “net-enabled.” For the Navy, that term has meaning. A net-enabled weapon (NEW) is assisted by the net, getting updates on its target from other platforms, but is not dependent on it.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, can do many things, but high-g maneuvers to evade obstacles are not among them. This could change, however, as researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, New York and Stanford universities work to achieve “fast (35 mph.), accurate and repeatable flight” with a small UAV. The team, led by Associate Professor Russ Tedrake of MIT, built a trial UAV with a wingspan of 28 in.
The U.S. Army is exploring whether a short-range missile defense target, designed to be one-third the price of using Patriot missiles in such a role, can feasibly be added to its arsenal to reduce the cost of flight testing. The Economical Target makes use of surplus rocket motors, coupled with a rudimentary rocket body to effectively form a sounding rocket suitable for some missile defense tests, says Thomas Webber, acting director for rapid transition at Army Strategic Command. Lt. Gen.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has successfully tested an imaging device at 0.96 and 1.4 gigapixels of resolution (see photo), developed for its Aware—Advanced Wide FOV(field of view) Architectures for Image Reconstruction and Exploitation—program. One goal of the effort is to produce an imaging system with as many as 150 parallel micro-scale cameras behind a spherical objective lens, which will eventually generate ultra-wide FOV images of up to 50 gigapixels.
U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations Command (Marsoc) will soon get a new version of its signature .45-caliber M45 handgun. The Marine Corps Systems Command announced on July 18 that it had awarded Colt Defense of West Hartford, Conn., a $22.5 million contract to supply up to 12,000 Close Quarter Battle Pistols (Model O1070CQBP) and spare parts to Marsoc through July 2017. The Colt sidearm reportedly outperformed competitive .45-caliber weapons from Springfield Armory and Smith & Wesson in accuracy and other areas, notably durability.
ST. LOUIS — Boeing continues to refine the design of upgrades to increase the performance of the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, and says recently completed wind-tunnel evaluations have cleared the way for flight test of the enhancements if there is sufficient customer interest. The conformal fuel tanks (CFT), internal infrared search and track (ISRT) sensor and stealthy weapons pods, combined with more-powerful versions of the E/F’s General Electric F414 engines, are designed to increase range and acceleration and reduce radar signature.
Just as the Pentagon has asked for authority to put five programs into contracts that will run for up to four years, budget turmoil on Capitol Hill threatens to throw a wrench in the Defense Department’s plan to save money and add stability to the industrial base on those and other long-term agreements.
