COLUMBIA, Md., Dec. 6 -- Essex Corp. announced it recently received $4 million in awards for its patented volumetric synthetic aperture radar (VSAR) 3-D image processing technology. Delivery on the awards, which are a combination of new awards and expansions of existing ones, will be in the next 2 to 20 months. SAR has been used primarily for defense and intelligence operations, but civilian use has increased in the last decade with the launch of SAR satellites by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japanese Earth Resources Satellite and the Canadian Radarsat. The most recent launch was the ESA Envisat, an advanced polar-orbiting Earth observation satellite that provides measurements of the atmosphere, ocean, land and ice. Applications for SAR include reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting, treaty verification, navigation and guidance, change detection and environmental monitoring. "Our VSAR technology is being used today to save lives in the war on terrorism," said Essex CEO and president Leonard Moodispaw. "Our ability to produce advanced SAR products is now proving its value in operational use in the field. The momentum resulting from these projects will carry forward into 2005, when we plan on integrating VSAR with the capabilities of our newly acquired GIS and Cognitive Computing groups to pursue new types of imaging products and applications." Essex's VSAR technology creates true 3-D imagery from SAR data. This improvement in SAR image processing is similar to the dramatic improvement in medical imaging that a CAT scan provides over flat x-ray images. Essex said VSAR has the potential to open a wide variety of new SAR applications, such as foliage- and ground-penetrating imaging. For more information, visit: www.essexcorp.com