Chronos: Multidomain Assured Surveillance and Tracking

Unified awareness across air and sea

Chronos is a flexible multidomain sensing platform that enhances situational awareness across air, maritime, and unmanned operations. It combines everything you need for enhanced situational awareness of cooperative traffic into a single operating picture. Available in passive and active architectures, Chronos provides scalable surveillance while minimizing unnecessary transmissions and dependence on existing infrastructure.

Supported Modalities

  • Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B)
  • SSR Mode A/C Transponder
  • Automatic Identification System (AIS)
  • Remote ID

Functionality

Chronos delivers situational awareness through a three-stage process: detecting cooperative traffic, independently determining its position, and validating that position against the location reported by the target. Together, these capabilities give operators a more trusted, tamper-resistant picture of air, maritime, and unmanned traffic.

Detect

Chronos detects cooperative air, maritime, and unmanned traffic, providing gap filler surveillance in remote, terrain-masked, or infrastructure-limited environments.

Chronos’ rapidly deployable design provides an independent operating picture for defense and security, UAS operations, disaster relief, search and rescue, and wildfire response.

Verify

Chronos uses multilateration and phased-array bearing measurements to independently determine the source location of transmissions without relying on the position reported by the target.

For assured positioning, navigation, and timing, active Chronos ground stations at known locations act as reference beacons for an onboard passive Chronos receiver, supporting APNT when GNSS is unavailable or untrusted.

Validate

Chronos compares independently derived RF position against the target’s reported location from ADS-B, AIS, or Remote ID to confirm consistency and flag discrepancies or possible spoofing.

For transponder-equipped aircraft, Chronos fingerprints ANSP SSR interrogations to independently derive the aircraft’s position and cross-check it against its ADS-B-reported location.

Operating Modes

Omni-directional Mode

Omni-directional

Chronos leverages local secondary surveillance radar, intercepting aircraft transponder replies, while also receiving other broadcast signals to build a common operating picture.

MLAT Mode

Multilateration

Multiple Chronos stations networked into a scalable wide area MLAT (WAM) system, expanding coverage while minimizing infrastructure, maintenance, and operating costs.

Phased-Array Mode

Phased Array

A phased-array architecture is under development. It provides precise tracking using directional sensing, angle-of-arrival measurements, and improved target localization from a single station.

Wide Area Multilateration

Wide Area Multilateration

Multiple Chronos stations can be networked into a scalable wide-area multilateration (WAM) system, expanding coverage while minimizing infrastructure, maintenance, and operating costs. The system will employ a listen-whisper-shout protocol to reduce frequency-band congestion.

Active Phased Array

Active Phased Array

An active phased-array architecture is under development to provide precise tracking using single-site bearing estimation, angle-of-arrival measurements, and improved target localization without reliance on local secondary surveillance radar infrastructure.

Deployment Configuration

The Chronos platform is compact, lightweight, and highly portable, allowing rapid deployment across a wide range of operational environments. Its flexible architecture supports installation across multiple platform types.

Ground station deployment

Ground Station

Suitable for fixed, mobile, or temporary sites.

UAV deployment

UAV

Extends line-of-sight coverage and enables elevated sensing over remote and obstructed environments.

USV deployment

USV

Mobile maritime platform for extended offshore surveillance.

Aircraft deployment

Aircraft

Delivers enhanced situational awareness and expanded surveillance coverage for crewed and unmanned aviation operations.