DARPAÂ April 22, 2022
DARPA’s new Ouija program aims to use sensors on low-orbiting satellites to provide new insights into HF radio wave propagation in the ionosphere. Ouija will augment ground-based measurements with in-situ measurements from space, in very low- Earth orbit (VLEO), to develop and validate accurate, near real-time HF propagation predictions. The VLEO altitude regime is of particular interest due to its information-rich environment where ionospheric electron density is at a maximum. The program includes two technical areas. The first technical area announced in a solicitation, seeks to develop, qualify, launch, and operate multiple small satellites carrying scientific and mission instrumentation. The Ouija scientific payload will measure electron density by both direct sampling and indirectly via radio occultation using navigation satellites. The second technical area, which will be fully detailed in a separate solicitation at a later date, aims to develop assimilative models that ingest direct, in-situ, measurements of electron density from a satellite in VLEO. The goal is to improve fidelity over current state-of-the-art assimilative models by incorporating high resolution (in time and space) local measures with low latency updates…read more.