Astria

Astria is a distributed radar system built by CHAOS Industries, a US defence-sensing startup, and introduced in 2024. Rather than relying on a single high-power radar aperture, Astria stitches together many smaller networked nodes that CHAOS says operate coherently as one virtual sensor — an approach the company calls its Coherent Distributed Network architecture. The system is pitched at persistent surveillance and simultaneous multi-object tracking, with the company naming small drones and ballistic missiles among the threat classes it is meant to address.

The technical claim underlying Astria is coherent aggregation: distributed nodes synchronise timing and phase tightly enough that their returns can be combined as if they came from a single radar with an aperture the size of the whole network. CHAOS presents this as a way to gain effective aperture and resilience without scaling any one antenna, and to reconfigure the sensor’s geometry by moving or adding nodes rather than by rebuilding hardware. The company describes the system as software-defined; specific waveforms, frequency bands, node hardware, and the compute stack behind the tracking software have not been publicly detailed.

The declared operator is the United States. CHAOS says Astria completed an AFWERX Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) validation at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida in 2024, one of the US Air Force’s principal ranges for weapons and sensor testing. CHAOS Industries itself is one of a newer cohort of US venture-backed defence-tech firms, and has drawn attention for raising sizeable funding rounds against the pitch that distributed sensing can supplement or replace some of the roles held by legacy air-defence radars. Astria is not combat-tested, and no operational deployment has been announced.

The system sits within a broader shift in US air-defence sensing toward distributed and multi-static radar concepts, a space in which incumbent primes such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are also active. What CHAOS emphasises about Astria is speed of setup and reconfigurability — nodes combined in software rather than assembled as a single fixed installation, which the company argues makes it harder for a jammer or a single kinetic strike to blind the network. Whether the coherent-network architecture delivers the surveillance range and tracking quality of larger single-aperture radars in the field is something independent testing outside the AFWERX framework has not yet shown publicly.