Accurate Aerosol Identification—Really Fast
The bottom line is that right now it’s very difficult and potentially dangerous to identify harmful chemicals or agents once they’re aerosolized.
However, one of IARPA’s newest programs, Pursuing Intelligent Complex Aerosols for Rapid Detection (PICARD), hopes to give the USG and IC a tool that will help reduce risk while accurately and quickly detecting harmful aerosols.
The PICARD program intends to do this by developing fieldable sensing platforms for the rapid chemical identification of aerosol particles. The program will address both point detection and standoff capabilities that focus on the complexity of aerosols with non-uniform sizes, forms and structures, chemical composition, and dispersion in challenging environments.
While PICARD won’t officially launch until later in 2023—the Broad Agency Announcement was published November 18, 2022 and proposals were due on January 23, 2023—Dr. Pilkington is excited about the program’s prospects. “This is a difficult issue to solve, but it’s a problem I’m confident we’ll be able to address and, because lives and our nation’s security are depending on it, it’s a problem we really need to address,” Dr. Pilkington said.