DARPA’S LITTLE COUSIN GETS ITS PROPS

“The Technical Support Working Group has been toil­ing against ter­ror for years, but its tech­no­log­i­cally advanced work has been over­shad­owed by DARPA,” Wired News says. “Now TSWG is step­ping into the lime­light.“

TSWG has his­tor­i­cally focused on short-​​term projects that cre­ate usable pro­to­types to solve real-​​world prob­lems. The group’s 2002 annual report points to the group’s suc­cess in cre­at­ing a bet­ter flat-​​panel X-​​ray machine to help bomb squads and a coun­tert­er­ror­ism kit to help edu­cate law enforce­ment and emer­gency work­ers how to rec­og­nize, by sight and smell, chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal and radi­o­log­i­cal mate­ri­als.
Chemical– and biological-​​weapon escape masks devel­oped by TSWG have been ordered in the thou­sands by the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, accord­ing to Jeff David, deputy direc­tor of the Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office, which over­sees TSWG.
Other cur­rent projects include a lug­gage irra­di­a­tion machine that would destroy unde­tected bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal weapons, bet­ter bomb dis­posal robots, bullet-​​detecting radar to pre­vent assas­si­na­tions, a project to extract DNA from fin­ger­prints, a cool­ing sys­tem for body armor and a mass tran­sit sur­veil­lance cam­era system. 

June 24th, 2003 | Los Alamos and Labs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.