Regio Zuid-Holland | Aurora: Passive Radar Technology Enabling Airspace Integration and Certification of UAVs

Flight opportunities for suborbital space flights are very limited. They are extremely expensive, booked years in advance, and are powered by solid rocket motors which emit harmful exhaust chemicals. Rockets crash into Earth or the Ocean after flight, more often than not with the customer payload inside. This is a huge environmental concern. New players have emerged in this market. However, they still only launch a few times a year, one launch is still costing over €1M and therefore dedicated trajectories are not possible for smaller payloads. .Furthermore, having a very inflexible schedule means that researchers still have to wait years to get their payloads to fly. Dawn Aerospace (Dawn) is building the Dawn Mk-II Aurora Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Operating like an airliner, it will take off from an airport, bring the payload to where it needs to be in space and then land again to be refuelled and fly again on the same day. .In order to comply to EASA Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) regulations, Dawn will work together with Radar Based Avionics (RBA) and MetaSensing (MS) in this MIT R&D collaboration project. RBA will focus on developing the algorithms and software to be able to detect and avoid other aircraft in the vicinity of the UAV. MS will focus on the development of the RADAR transmitter on the ground, and the receiver on board the Dawn Mk-II Aurora..This project enables a durable combination of the “topsector’s themes” and a topsector overlapping cooperation between HTSM parties from Space (Dawn) and Aviation (MS and RBA). Combining rocket propelled UAVs, innovative radar-based avionics and passive RADAR technology leads to valuable product development and valorization of knowledge..Successful completion of this project will allow Dawn to deploy the Dawn Mk-II Aurora in Europe, enabling us to fully tap into the 600M+ Suborbital Spaceflight market. For RBA and MS this project is the perfect pilot into the 1000M+ Sense and Avoid market.