DARPA's New Spy Satellite

DARPA, Pentagon's research arm, has described its dream military space telescope that could gather intelligence anywhere in the world, doing away with the need for spy planes or drones.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense that handles the development of new technology for use by the military.

It is also responsible for funding the development of many technologies which have had a major effect on the world, including surveillance equipments like space telescopes.

As envisioned by DARPA, the military telescope will be a lightweight optics array made of flexible membrae that could deploy in space. The dream telescope should be able to hover in geosynchronous orbit that could take real-time images or videos of any spot on Earth.

For this purpose, DARPA has commissioned Ball Aerospace which had completed a proof-of-concept review as part of $37 million contract for the telescope. The research agency's requirement is a space telescope with a collection aperture or light-collecting power of almost 20 meters in diameter.

DARPA said that the telescope, which image resolution should see objects less than 10 feet (3 m) long within a single image pixel, should be able to spot missile launcher vehicles moving at speeds of up to 60 mph on the ground.

With the completion of the project, U.S. military commanders and intelligence agents should be able to get live streaming video and up-to-date images of battlefields or trouble spots around the world. Such capability could complement the present drones that provides battlefield surveillance to the military.

DARPA's mission has been to assure that the U.S. maintains a lead in applying state-of-the-art technology for military capabilities and to prevent technological surprise from her adversaries.