…Hunt Subs.
"No matter how silent or deep you run, enemy submariners, the Pentagon's mad scientists say they're getting better at finding you.
Darpa announced today that it's successfully tested two bleeding-edge methods of detecting quiet submarines lost under the ocean depths. One relies on distributed sensors at the bottom of the ocean floor to locate the subs. The other sends an aquatic robot to hunt them. They're both part of an effort called Distributed Agile Submarine Hunting, or DASH, and they're not even the sum total of Darpa's anti-submarine warfare programs.
One aspect of DASH is a series of drop-and-forget sonar devices, called the Transformational Reliable Acoustic Path System, or TRAPS. (Darpa likes functional acronyms, and presumably the music of T.I.) Each TRAP is a fixed, passive sonar node, designed to plop on the sea floor and communicate back to a floating "stationary surface node" through a wireless acoustic modem when something that sounds like a sub churns past. The idea is to trade sophistication for a distributed array of sensor packages that, once networked, will set up a vast, er, trap of sound detection.
That is, if the hardware is durable; the modems can handle the depths; and no one hacks or spoofs the TRAPS. There is no tech support under the waves. "This is a gamble," Darpa program manager Andy Coon said in a prepared statement, "but we believe the potential payoff will be high." As Jeezy and Drama put it, TRAP or die.
The second component to DASH is a yellow robotic submarine, shown above, called the Submarine Hold at RisK, or — wait for it — SHARK. Described by Darpa as a "mobile active sonar platform," the SHARK is supposed to track submarines once they're initially detected, presumably by the PATHs. Darpa disclosed today that it took the SHARK to an unspecified depth in February, which Coon likened to "going to another planet…"
Full article here.
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