Trident Systems has received a contract to competitively develop a payload for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s effort that leverages commercial small satellite busses.
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The company said Thursday its Trident payload includes a heterogeneous processor and data converters that work together to function as an on-orbit reprogrammable transceiver for the Blackjack program.
The transceiver would operate with a Cubic-made graphics processing unit and a wideband antenna to host future payloads in an open architecture.
“We’re looking forward to demonstrating multiple radio frequency modalities, on-board processing and on-orbit reprogrammability from a payload that meets DARPA’s very aggressive constraints on size, weight, power and cost for Blackjack,” said Nick Karangelen, president of Trident.