By Calvin Biesecker
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 told Congress last week.
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, told 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. If the integration testing goes well, then that system will advance to field validation testing, he said. The integration testing is done to verify that ASP performance remains sound when it is integrated into the port of entry architecture, he said.
DNDO declined to say which company’s system is further along in the testing process. Gallaway said, however, that the system in field validation testing, which is being done “hand-in-hand” with the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the ultimate customer, has had an issue that required a break in the testing until the data is analyzed.
Gallaway said that the ASP was being tested along side the current generation technology, commonly called a Radiation Portal Monitor.
“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 said. “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 Defense Daily 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.”
The current generation RPMs are based on polyvinyl toluene detection material and aren’t able to 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 certify that the systems lead to a significant advance in capability over the current RPMs before entering production.
DNDO was expected to bring the ASPs 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 (Defense Daily, Nov. 16, 2007).