Logos Technologies Successfully Flight Tests SPRITE Multi-Sensor Pod for ONR

FAIRFAX, Va. — Logos Technologies LLC announced July 27 that, with the successful test flight of the Spectral and Reconnaissance Imaging for Tactical Exploitation (SPRITE) pod earlier this year, has met all the goals of its five-year contract with the Office of Naval Research. 

A U.S. military version of the company’s platform-agnostic Multi-Modal Sensor Pod (MMSP), SPRITE was flown on a manned Cessna 337 Super Skymaster. 

“We had SPRITE flying between four and five hours a day for a whole week,” said Chris Stellman, lead principal scientist and program manager for Logos Technologies. “We were able to use SPRITE’s sensor modalities to detect signatures of interest, process that data on the fly, and stream it down in real time to users on the ground. 

The SPRITE pod houses an ultra-light Logos Technologies RedKite WAMI sensor, a high-definition spotter camera, and commercial shortwave infrared hyperspectral sensor. In addition, SPRITE contained a palm-sized Multi-Modal Edge Processor (MMEP), also developed by Logos Technologies, to process the deluge of raw data being produced by all three sensors, in real time, and cross cue between the sensors. 

The MMEP is the brains of the SPRITE pod,” Stellman said. “It’s what makes data actionable to the warfighter and searchable to the analyst.” 

Though the Office of Naval Research contract required a specific set of sensors, the MMSP is very flexible regarding the payloads it can house. For example, instead of a hyperspectral sensor, it could include LIDAR or a signals intelligence package, depending on customer need.