HWBRIEF
A NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts study at Duke sketches a reconfigurable radar in space, because ground radar built for low orbit cannot see lunar traffic at the same resolution.
A radar big enough to track four-inch objects at lunar distances would need an aperture the size of a small city, and the ground arrays that watch low Earth orbit physically cannot close that gap. NASA's 2026 NIAC selection for a Duke University-led concept study sketches a workaround: stop building on the ground and start assembling the sensor in space.
PI David R. Smith and team propose a spaceborne radar that pairs robotic in-space assembly with reconfigurable volumetric electromagnetic metamaterials: engineered blocks whose electromagnetic behavior is set by geometry rather than chemistry. The unit-cell design lets the same modular block stack into arbitrarily large apertures, sidestepping the single-launch-fairing ceiling that holds deployable antennas near 100 meters.
Required array size scales in direct proportion to target distance, so a ground radar that can see a small object in LEO cannot see the same object at lunar range. That is why the U.S. Space Surveillance Network stays effective in low orbit and falls off geometrically past it.
This is concept funding, not a flight program. The 2026 NIAC slate backs early-stage architecture work, and the agency's award notice places the study in Phase I. The in-space assembly step is itself unproven, and the concept does not yet compare to optical or distributed smaller-radar alternatives. No cost, schedule, or launch date has been published.