DARPA Wants an MRI for the Earth at 40,000 Feet. DV023 Pays $700K — But You Must Already Own a Flying Radar to Bid.

Most federal solicitations describe a capability that does not exist yet and ask you to explain how you would build it. DARPA's newest radar topic inverts that. It describes a capability that already exists at low altitude, then asks whether you can push it up four miles and make the physics survive the trip.

DPA26BZ06-DV023, "Novel Radio Frequency Sensing Technologies," pre-released September 2, 2026 as part of Release 6 of the FY26 Department of War SBIR Broad Agency Announcement. It opened for submissions September 23 and closes October 21, 2026 at 12:00 PM ET on the Defense SBIR/STTR Innovation Portal. The award is $700,000 over an 18-month base period, with a $500,000 option covering six additional months.

The objective, in DARPA's own framing, is a high-altitude (~40,000 ft), high-speed (~400 knots) airborne geologic sensing system that delivers rapid, stand-off 3D subsurface tomographic imaging — detecting subterranean metals and critical minerals from a fixed-wing aircraft flying at cruise.

That is an MRI for the Earth, taken at highway speed from the stratosphere.

The eligibility wall comes before the technology

Read the feasibility requirements before you read anything else, because for the overwhelming majority of radar companies this topic is already closed.

Proposers must already possess an operational airborne subsurface radar validated through actual flight tests at low altitude and speed — up to roughly 10,000 feet. And DARPA states the point without hedging: modeling and simulation data alone is not sufficient to prove feasibility.

Three specific artifacts are mandatory in the feasibility documentation:

1. Empirical flight data with 3D tomographic reconstructions that actually show mineral detection — not a processing chain that could in principle produce them
2. Receiver characterization demonstrating a low thermal noise floor
3. Analytical scaling models showing the architectural transition from your baseline system to the high-power design

The feasibility section is capped at 10 pages inside a 35-page technical volume — 20 pages for the technical proposal and 5 for commercialization. Ten pages is not much room to prove you have already flown the thing.

This is a deliberate filter. Direct-to-Phase-II topics exist precisely to skip the discovery phase, and DARPA is using the prerequisite to convert a national open competition into a contest among the handful of firms and university spinouts that have flown airborne ground-penetrating or subsurface tomographic radar and kept the data. If you are a simulation house, an antenna designer, or an RF power specialist, your path here is as a subcontractor to one of those firms — not as a prime.

The number that organizes every design decision

The governing physics is the radar range equation, and the topic states it plainly: necessary transmit power scales as range to the fourth power.

Moving from 10,000 feet to 40,000 feet is a 4x increase in range. Four to the fourth power is 256. Holding imaging performance constant, the high-altitude system needs on the order of 256 times the transmit power of the system that qualified you to bid.

Every hard requirement in this topic falls out of that single number. DARPA names five technical pillars, and each is a downstream consequence:

• A reliable kilowatt-class RF power amplifier. That is where the 256x goes.
• An antenna that survives ~400 knots at ~40,000 feet. Aperture wants to be large; aerodynamics and structural loads want it small and stiff. That tension is the design.
• High-capacity heat dissipation with no aircraft cooling available. A kilowatt-class transmitter is also a kilowatt-class heater, and you are not plumbing into the airframe.
• Zero electromagnetic interference with aircraft systems, per MIL-STD-461G. You are radiating high-power RF from a platform full of avionics that must not notice.
• FPGA edge processing for real-time tomography. Because of the next constraint.

The self-contained payload requirement is the real architecture spec

The system must generate its own power and perform all processing onboard. No aircraft integration. No downlinking raw data to the ground.

Read that as a deployment doctrine rather than an engineering preference. A payload that draws no aircraft power, needs no wiring changes, and requires no ground segment can be strapped to whatever airframe is available in whatever country it is available in — and moved the following week. DARPA is not buying a radar for a specific aircraft. It is buying a pod that treats the aircraft as a rented seat.

The consequence for proposers is severe and easy to underestimate in a cost volume: onboard power generation and thermal rejection compete with the transmitter for the same mass, volume, and drag budget, and the real-time tomographic reconstruction that would otherwise happen in a ground datacenter now has to close on FPGAs inside that same envelope.

Why this topic exists now

Subsurface prospecting has been an economics problem before it was a sensing problem. DARPA's framing is that improving mineral exploration success rates — it cites moving from something like 1-in-200 toward near certainty — is what turns critical mineral supply-chain independence from an aspiration into an engineering program.

This topic is also the sensing half of a research line DARPA has been building for years. The agency's CriticalMAAS program, run with the U.S. Geological Survey, attacked the analysis half: AI extraction of geospatial data from maps and documents, mineral potential mapping via multi-modal fusion, and human-in-the-loop refinement. Its headline result was compressing a critical mineral assessment workflow that historically took roughly two years for a single deposit type down to about two and a half days, with a dozen pilot assessments and reproduced national-scale zinc, copper, and nickel assessments behind it. The program's final hackathon ran in January 2025.

CriticalMAAS made existing data dramatically faster to interpret. DV023 is an attempt to make dramatically more data — measured directly, in three dimensions, at survey speed. The two together describe a full pipeline: fly the continent, image the subsurface, and let AI rank the targets.

That pipeline sits inside a much larger federal push. Critical minerals now run through DOE's billion-dollar supply chain programs, and the Department of War's Office of Strategic Capital opened a National Security Fund Finance Program offering credit facilities of $500 million to $1 billion per fund to managers investing in critical mineral companies, with proposals due November 1, 2026. A $700,000 SBIR is a rounding error against those numbers — which is exactly why winning it matters. It is the cheapest available credential in a sector where the follow-on capital is enormous.

The milestone schedule tells you where the risk is priced

The 18-month base period carries fixed payable deliverables at months 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18. Seven payment gates in eighteen months is a tight leash by SBIR standards, and it signals a program office that intends to watch hardware maturity closely rather than wait for a final report.

The gate that matters is Month 12: the Safety and Test Readiness Review. It requires documented flight clearances for high-power RF emissions before the Month 15 flight campaign.

Build your schedule backward from that date. Flight clearance for a kilowatt-class emitter on a crewed aircraft is a paperwork and coordination problem that runs on institutional time, not engineering time — range scheduling, spectrum authorization, airworthiness sign-off on the pod, and EMC test evidence against MIL-STD-461G. Teams that treat Month 12 as a technical review and start the clearance process at Month 10 will miss Month 15, and the option period sits on the other side of it.

How proposals are actually judged here

One structural detail changes how you should write: DARPA evaluates proposals individually against the stated criteria, not against each other. Awards go to proposals where the strengths outweigh the weaknesses, with explicit attention to avoiding accumulated weaknesses that would require extensive renegotiation.

Two implications follow. First, there is no fixed number of winners to out-compete — you are clearing a bar, not winning a ranking. Second, "accumulated weaknesses requiring extensive renegotiation" is evaluator language for a proposal that is technically interesting but administratively unbuildable. A cost volume using DARPA's mandatory template that quietly assumes aircraft power, or a schedule that leaves flight clearance undated, reads as renegotiation risk regardless of how good the radar is.

Technical questions close October 14, 2026 at SBIR_BAA@darpa.mil with the topic number in the subject line — one week before the proposal deadline. Use it. Selection notification follows within 90 days of close.

Who should actually bid

Bid if you have flown a subsurface imaging radar, you own the flight data and the reconstructions, and you can name the power amplifier vendor and the thermal approach in the first three pages. Everything else in this topic is engineering you can staff.

Do not bid as a prime if your evidence is a simulation, a ground-based system, or a drone-mounted instrument at 400 feet — the altitude gap is not a scaling exercise, it is the entire topic. Position instead as a teammate on the specific pillar you own, and note that DARPA's Release 6 runs a broad portfolio closing the same day, including three STTR topics with a 30% research-institution requirement and an AI evaluation topic paying $1.8 million as a single committed tranche.

The deadline is October 21, 2026, 12:00 PM ET. DARPA does not accept late submissions, and DSIP does not care why.