Paper Objective:

Provide a background on PAR technology advances and potential benefits as well as the technological and cost challenges ahead in order to meet the Nation's increasing demands for improved service using advanced sensor systems, while facing diminishing budgets.

Possible Outline:

• Introduction/Background on MPAR Program

• Update on the multi-function phased array radar effort

• System concept of operation

• Technology challenges/advancements

• Cost reduction/management efforts

• MPAR resource management/tradeoffs

• MPAR future

• Summary

Abstract:

For years the federal government has been heavily dependant on radar for surveillance of both weather and aircraft. As a result, radar technology design, manufacture and application development has matured rapidly. As the demand for improved public weather safety increases and the air transportation system continues to experience extensive growth, there will be even more demand placed on the legacy radar resources. It has become clear that the agencies utilizing radar must come together in order to meet these increasing demands to improve service using advanced sensor systems, while facing diminishing budgets. The United States government recognizes the need to conduct research and development to pursue new and advanced surveillance technologies.

The multi-function Phased Array Radar (MPAR) effort is a multi-agency partnership among the Departments of Transportation (Federal Aviation Administration), Commerce (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), Defense and Homeland Security (Science and Technology). Exploiting the extensive work and success of the Department of Defense (DOD) with the implementation of Phased Array Radar (PAR) for missile defense, civilian agencies are exploring the application of an advanced MPAR network to perform the weather, aircraft surveillance and homeland security defense functions.

The MPAR effort envisions using affordable active solid state transmit/receive modules in a non-rotating electronically scanned array to detect weather and targets (cooperative and non-cooperative as required) simultaneously and with greater speed and accuracy than today's systems. Recent work has begun to study the cost issue in regards to parts and manufacturing, and to analyze the resource tradeoffs required to support weather, and air surveillance capabilities. This paper will provide an update of the MPAR effort describe the advances stated and discuss future research work.