The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has completed its first large-scale field test of mobile radiation detectors in Washington, D.C. this fall.
The field test involved hundreds of volunteers carrying the “low-cost, high-efficiency” devices the size of smartphones throughout the city in a test of DARPA’s SIGMA program, which involves networked sensors that provide real-time radiation detection in urban areas. The sensors are designed to detect gamma and neutron radiation and via a smartphone network alert officials of potential threats in real time, the agency said.
The system is intended to detect small quantities of radioactive material that could be used in the development and detonation of a radiological “dirty bomb,” it said.
DARPA said in its announcement that “the 1,000-detector deployment in Washington, D.C., marked the largest number of SIGMA mobile detectors ever tested at one time and was a demonstration of the program’s ability to fuse the data provided by all those sensors to create minute-to-minute situational awareness of nuclear threats.”
The field test was largely carried out by the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism; ROTC cadets from D.C.-region universities and midshipmen from the U.S. Naval Academy were recruited as volunteers.
DARPA said it will continue to test the system’s monitoring capability next year and provide local, state, and federal entities with the operational system in 2018.
