Posted by Courtney E. Howard
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., 13 July 2011. Raytheon BBN Technologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN), won $2.4 million in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding to design an information architecture for wireless small module satellites, in support of secure, real-time communications among satellite modules and the System F6 program.
The F6 program’s goal is to replace large satellites with clusters of less costly, small modules that deliver resources over a wireless network. The end result will be space-based, clustered wireless modules that not only work seamlessly as a whole, but also are easy to replace or add without interrupting communications or requiring the satellite to be taken offline.
"With this contract award, our goal is nothing short of assuring that DARPA gets a superior networking capability that enables F6's many advantages over a single large satellite," says Craig Partridge, principal investigator at Raytheon BBN Technologies.
For more on communications in mil-aero environments, read High-performance computing benefits signal- and data processing in aerospace and defense applications.
