Foliage Penetrating Synthetic Aperture Radar (FOPEN)
Not that long ago the U.S. military lacked an ability to detect and pinpoint vehicles, buildings, and other targets, like missile launchers, in broad areas of dense forest and wooded terrain
Seeking to address this critical deficiency the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army’s Communications-Electronics Research Development and Engineering Center’s Intelligence and Information Warfare
Directorate, in the late 1990s, enlisted Lockheed Martin to develop a novel, foliage penetrating synthetic aperture radar, known as FOPEN.
With today’s U.S. Army-led Tactical Reconnaissance and Counter-Concealment Enabled Radar program, or TRACER, the legacy FOPEN radar system continues to grow in capability, application, and reliability while continuous research and technology improvements have shrunk size, weight, and power consumption.
The TRACER system builds upon the FOPEN technology advancements by not only shrinking and modernizing the radar, but also by configuring it for unmanned endurance aircraft. These technology advances, coupled with lessons learned from ongoing FOPEN operations, have contributed to new concepts of operations for the system, as well.
“FOPEN has proven to be a very capable and unique radar,” says Anthony Lisuzzo, director of Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate.
“The value of the data generated by the FOPEN system has been fully recognized by senior military leaders, resulting in a high demand for its employment in the Global War on Terror.” Lockheed Martin’s Robert Robinson, who heads the FOPEN program, adds that TRACER holds promise to address not only traditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, but other pressing missions, including finding deadly improvised explosive devices.
Seeing the Forest...Through the Trees
 Unlike other imaging radars, the dual-band FOPEN system uses low-frequency radio waves to achieve high-resolution penetration of concealed areas –– natural ones like leaves or wood, or man-made camouflage –– with relatively low loss in signal strength at ranges of up to 60 km.
According to Robinson, FOPEN’s onboard image processing and data transmission links allow users on the ground to receive mission planning and target exploitation information they seek –– within 10 meter accuracy — virtually in real-time.
Over the course of hundreds of flights over the past decade, the FOPEN radar system’s detection and tomography capabilities have proven extremely robust against a variety of targets and foliage environments. The radar’s advanced detection capability suppresses background clutter and returns from stationary objects, while revealing the positions of mobile and portable targets. The system can be operated from low to very-high altitudes –– on manned and
unmanned platforms.
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This article is taken from the 2nd Quarter edition of Insights, a Lockheed Martin customer publication
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