The U.S. Air Force announced May 23 it selected Lockheed Martin to continue development of the Innovative Space Based Radar Antenna Technology, or ISAT. The contract, valued at $19.5 million, is for the next phase of the Defense Advanced Research Laboratory Project Agency (DARPA) project, which is administered by the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Lockheed Martin will continue development of the ISAT Flight Demonstration Experiment design throughout the next 14 months, which will take the technology to the critical design review (CDR) maturity level. Following the CDR, DARPA and the Air Force plan to select a contractor to build and deploy a scale version of the antenna for a one-year proof of technology experiment in low earth orbit.

The objective of ISAT is to create and demonstrate a technology for very long space-borne electronically scanning antenna.