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PROWLER

COMMERCIAL SPINOFF FROM SPY SATELLITE The Hughes commercial geomobile communications satellite system features an innovative, lightweight, 12.25-meter deployable antenna, and onboard digital signal processing and beamforming. The APMT satellites are high-power versions of Hughes' top-selling, body-stabilized spacecraft, the HS 601. Each APMT will have two solar wings covered in gallium arsenide solar cells generating about 7 kilowatts of power to provide 6 kilowatts of payload power.

PROWLER was an antecedent of the Precision SIGINT Targeting System (PSTS) Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration [ACTD]. Apart from the Army RC-12 Guardrail's Communications High-Accuracy Location System (CHALS) and Quicklook ES systems use of time-difference-of-arrival direction-finding, few existing SIGINT systems provide targetable geolocation accuracies against communications or radar emitters. PSTS is a Joint Service and Defense Agency effort to develop and demonstrate a near-real-time, precision targeting, sensor-to-shooter capability using existing national [including overhead] and tactical systems. PSTS will provide tactical users with targeting that is one order of magnitude improvement over what can be accomplished by any of the single candidate systems operating alone.

Resources

• A Search for the Lost IDCSP Constellation, from the 19th Space Control Conference, 3 April 2001

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