The Army is exploring various high-altitude platforms such as balloons, drones and super-lightweight aircrafts for deep sensing to long range communications and missions. This is being considered after the successful Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor system (known as JLENS). This program was cancelled in 2017 due to the incident where it became untethered and damaged power lines for thousands of residents in the Maryland/Pennsylvania area.
High Altitude Platforms are being viewed as a solution to achieving persistent and tethered surveillance for ISR missions. As a result, they published an RFI for their Multi-Domain Sensing System (MDSS) HELIOS/HAP-DS System. The High-Altitude Extended-Range Long-Endurance Intelligence Observation System (HELIOS) is a portion of the MDSS system that focuses on the integration of multiple sensing capabilities on different platforms; this includes a survivability suite in Multi-Domain Operations (MDO). The High-Altitude Platform – Deep Sensing (HAP-DS) is the experimentation and demonstration portion of the HELIOS subsystem. HAP-DS is focused on ELINT, COMINT and RADAR sensor capabilities and technologies.
The RFI is focused on:
1. Size, weight, power and cooling for the sensors
2. Parameters and characteristics of each sensor
3. Architecture type: Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) and Modular Open System Approach (MOSA)
Nowhere in the RFI is cybersecurity, across the platforms, discussed. As we discussed in the last class, standardization is a must. How do you secure across so many systems? How is the complexity being dealt with?
With these proposed systems living in LEO and VLEO, there are large collision and interference risks. Other challenges include wasted capability and high latency problems.
The illustration was done by the US Army and taken from the source[1] link.
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