The Chemical and Biological Defense (CBD) Program requires advanced standoff sensor technology that can provide more comprehensive threat information to enhance situational awareness and improve force protection. Historically, CBD and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) sensors have been developed with a focus on the individual missions, with little effort applied to developing integrated multimodal sensors capable of providing multifunction operation across both missions. Over the past two decades, several programs were pursued to integrate CBD and ISR sensor assets in a system-of-systems architecture to use tipping and cueing and data fusion to increase situational awareness and early warning. However, these were still disparate standalone sensors that did not include any hardware/software integration in a multimodal multifunction sensor construct. Spectral Sensor Solutions (S3) will leverage its advanced SWIR elastic backscatter lidar system to develop a state-of-the-art multimodal CBD/ISR sensor by adding an Active SWIR Imaging (ASI) mode to the system.
