By the end of FY ’09 the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) hopes to have successfully developed one company’s next-generation radiation portal monitor for certification by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the acting head of the agency tells Congress.
Two of the original three contractors remain in the Advanced Spectroscopic Portal (ASP) program and both companies’ systems are in varying stages of testing. Raytheon [RTN] and Thermo Fisher Scientific [TMO] continue to work under contract to DNDO. However, the agency did not pick up its option to maintain a contract with Canberra Industries, which is part of France’s AREVA Group.
Charles Gallaway, acting director of DNDO, tells the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee that of the two remaining contractors, one has entered field validation testing at four sites and the other is in integration testing at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). If the integration testing goes well then that system will advance to field validation testing, he says. The integration testing is done to verify that ASP performance remains sound when it is integrated into the port of entry architecture, he adds.
DNDO declined to say which company’s system is further along in the testing process. Gallaway says, however, that the system in field validation testing has had an issue that requires a pause in the testing until the data is analyzed. The testing is being done “hand-in-hand” with Customs and Border Protection, the ultimate customer.
The ASP system was being tested along side the current generation technology, commonly called a Radiation Portal Monitor (RPM), in actual port of entry operations.
“With the data we were receiving, we had a few concerns that the system was not working quite as well as we had hoped, so we paused the testing…while we analyze the data,” Gallaway says. “We anticipate that pause is probably going to go for about another month before we decide what to make of it. I’m optimistic we’ll be able to solve the issue and then we will start up field validation testing again. We’ll do some work back in tandem operation and then go into…solo operation where we turn off the existing systems and run exclusively with the ASP. That would be several more weeks.”
Asked later about the specific reason for the pause in the testing, DNDO told TR2 that, “This was a scheduled pause to evaluate test results to see if exit criteria have been met before proceeding to the next phase of field validation.”
Regarding the ASP system that is in field validation, Gallaway says it completed various rounds of earlier testing. The ASP went through system qualification testing to verify compliance with the performance specification, completed its integration testing with PNNL, which showed that the ASP performance “remains sound” when integrated into a port of entry architecture, and conducted two rounds of performance testing at the Nevada Test Site to validate the detection and identification capabilities against special nuclear materials and radioactive materials that could be used in a dirty bomb. The field validation testing is taking place at four sites.
Once the field validation phase is over, both systems will go through an operational testing and evaluation phase that will be managed by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s Operational Testing Authority. DNDO is also allowing the National Academy of Sciences to review ASP testing and inform the certification process as required by Congress.
Current generation RPMs are based on polyvinyl toluene detection material that can’t distinguish between threat materials and naturally occurring radioactive materials. The ASP systems are supposed to automatically detect and distinguish threat from non-threat materials, which in turn would lead to lower false alarm rates and fewer secondary screenings.
When DNDO awarded the ASP contracts in June of 2006 it had ambitious plans to get through development and into production, with hopes to purchase up to 1,400 systems within five years. However, performance issues cropped up during initial testing of the systems, leading to congressional direction that the Homeland Security Secretary certifies that the systems lead to a significant advance in capability over the current RPMs prior to entering production.
Gallaway says that DHS still plans to buy 1,400 ASPs, in both fixed and mobile applications, during the next five years. Raytheon early last year delivered a sport utility vehicle-based ASP to DNDO, the first of nine such mobile systems under a $5.9 million contract for various types of testing and concept demonstrations (TR2, Feb. 20, 2008).
DNDO was expected to bring the ASP certification request to then DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff in the summer of 2007 but concerns of CBP that the technology still wasn’t mature enough led to a continued development and testing regime.