Geospace Technologies Corporation announced its subsidiary Quantum Technology Sciences, Inc. signed a $1.5 million contract with the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA).

The contract is a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) to explore a new SADAR® capability using littoral seabed deployed passive seismic-acoustic phased arrays for monitoring energy sources of interest on the nearby land, water and air environments.

“Our parent company Geospace has decades of deployment experience with both cabled and nodal seismic systems in a marine environment for energy exploration. Through this project, we will blend the strength of Geospace’s experience in high quality seismic data acquisition in a littoral environment with the unmatched sophistication of Quantum’s seismic data analytics,” said Mark Tinker, CEO of Quantum Technology Sciences.

Historically, the land-water transition zone, which includes shallow littoral waters, the surf zone, and onshore terrestrial environments, is a difficult geographic zone to surveil. Overhead surveillance may provide limited time frames and discrete views of activities and can often be countered by camouflage, concealment, and deception (CCD) techniques. In contrast, surveillance using passive acoustic and seismic technologies such as SADAR® provides persistent monitoring that cannot be countered by CCD techniques and cannot be easily detected. Through this contract effort, improving upon individual unattended ground sensors, phased array networks will collect non-line-of-site signals for vibrational sources allowing separate, simultaneous target identification, classification and tracking in near real-time.

Source: businesswire.com