The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has awarded contracts to six corporate and academic organizations to research and develop technologies that could help detect and identify harmful aerosols in challenging environments as part of a multiyear program.
The Pursuing Intelligent Complex Aerosols for Rapid Detection program, also known as PICARD, intends to advance the development of standoff and in situ sensing systems to detect complex aerosols in pollutants, dust, pollen, wind and volcanic ash, IARPA said Wednesday.
“Identifying the chemicals in aerosol particles is a particularly hard problem due to dynamic environmental conditions and the way the chemicals mix and mold themselves into unique structures. For example, dust on the surface of a water droplet will change what the sensor sees,” said Sherrie Pilkington, PICARD program manager at IARPA.
The awardees are Detect-ION, Signature Science, Virginia Tech, University of Colorado Boulder, SRI International and Leidos.
The contracts were awarded through a competitive broad agency announcement.
“Resulting technology from PICARD will enable the Intelligence Community to more rapidly and accurately detect dangerous chemical aerosols, which will markedly improve the mitigation of chemical threat agents and help protect personnel and U.S. citizens,” added Pilkington.
The Naval Research Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will perform test and evaluation work on the PICARD program, which is expected to run for 42 months.
