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DARPA’s effort to track undersea life’s behavior as a means to detect enemy submarines has just entered its second phase. In the first phase, DARPA’s Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS) program sought to prove that sea life would respond to the presence of a submarine in a measurable way. With that seemingly confirmed, the second stage of the program will focus on developing sensors that can identify that behavior and relay a warning back to manned locations aboard a ship or onshore.

While the science is complex, the premise behind the PALS program is fairly simple. Undersea life tends to behave in a certain way when it senses the presence of a large and foreign object like a submarine. By broadly tracking the behavior of sea life, PALS aims to measure and interpret that behavior to make educated guesses about what must be causing it. In other words, by constantly tracking the behavior of nearby wildlife, PALS sensors can notice a significant change, compare it to a library of known behaviors, and predict a cause… like an enemy submarine, even if a submarine was stealthy enough to otherwise evade detection.

With enough data about how animals react to the presence of an enemy vessel as compared to how animals react to the presence of a large predator or more common undersea threat, PALS could serve as an early warning system when enemy subs approach.

“The SPEAR flight demonstrator will provide the F/A-18 Super Hornet and carrier strike group with significant improvements in range and survivability against advanced threat defensive systems,” Mercer, the firm’s SPEAR program manager, added.

Very-long-range, high-speed strike weapons could be very valuable for the Navy’s carrier air wings, especially as potential near-peer adversaries, such as China and Russia, continue to develop and field increasingly longer-range and otherwise more capable surface-to-air missile systems and associated radars and other sensors. Aircraft carriers and their associated strike groups and air wings are also increasingly at risk from various anti-access and area-denial capabilities, further underscoring the need for weapons with greater range and that are able to prosecute targets faster to help ensure their survival.

At present, the primary air-launched stand-off anti-ship and land-attack missiles available to them are the AGM-84D Harpoon anti-ship cruise missile, the AGM-84H/K Standoff Land Attack Missile-Expanded Response (SLAM-ER), and the AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), all of which are subsonic.

A very high speed camera.


Wang’s newest camera called, which has the wordy moniker “single-shot stereo-polarimetric compressed ultrafast photography” (SP-CUP), builds on previous iterations that were capable of shooting at even faster rates, some of them capable of shooting up to 70 trillion frames per second.

But what the new Caltech camera brings to the table is its ability to perceive the world more like humans can. The human eye’s depth perception relies on there being two of them — and the new rig can pull off the same stereoscopic trick.

“The camera is stereo now,” Wang said in a statement. “We have one lens, but it functions as two halves that provide two views with an offset. Two channels mimic our eyes.”