SONDRA was officially launched on 28 April 2004 in CentraleSupelec. The mission of SONDRA is to conduct unclassified basic research in advanced Electromagnetics and Radar domains.

As part of its mission, SONDRA contributes also to a better assessment of new technologies that are of interest to overcome various problems related to maritime surveillance in congested water areas, ground and air surveillance, homeland security. The characterization of the environment, whether « natural » or anthropogenic is more and more complicated as we aim at augmenting the sensitivity and performances of the surveillance systems in the current context of increased maritime and air traffics. Radar and EM detection technologies remain of great interest to catch “invisible targets”, i.e; target either masked by cloud cover, urban infrastructure, foliage or simply blocked by the horizon line of sight.

The alliance between the 4 parties offers a unique opportunity of development. NUS and CentraleSupélec provide an academic environment, effective at generating new collaborations with academic partners. On the other hand DSO and ONERA are very attentive on transition and experimental validation. The success of SONDRA is probably its capability to carry physics and signal processing research and to systematically register the research projects in a coherent framework leading to concrete actions and real validation, hence taking all attention from overseas stakeholder.