I always wanted to work for SRI when I was going to school at Stanford and afterwards, when I lived in Los Altos and Mountain View. I am so glad SRI is still around, and still doing basic and applied research!

These AMISR devices, developed by SRI, are clever AND important.

"A 2017 report by the NOAA National Weather Service on the economic and social impact of space weather in the United States, estimated that the one-time cost of protecting the U.S. power grid against space weather was $50 million to $1 billion."

This isn't a hypothetical scenario and cost estimate. One tends to get jaded after hearing John Kerry and Leonardo di Caprio bloviating about global warming as they jet off with their retinues of 800 to Glasgow for last month's annual climate summit in Scotland.

I got my amateur radio license awhile back. As a ‘ham’ radio operator, I learned about the negative impact of solar storms on terrestrial communications. As SRI mentions, 'space weather' due to a solar wind storm took out the entire Quebec electric power grid.

Incoherent Scatter Arrays (ISRs) are used to detect and predict when solar or geomagnetic storms are going to occur. Reuters used to have some impressive videos depicting Coronal Mass Ejections, which are HUGE sun flares. ISRs have been around for years, almost as long as Cold War-era early warning systems that are now idle. The latter were known as the DEW line.

Why is SRI clever?

They figured out how to take big, stationary ISR devices that were located in very cold places and make them small and portable. Better yet, they are operable remotely from places that are somewhat less cold and less remote. That's the rationale for the name. AMISR is an abbreviation for Advanced Modular ISR.

*I was an operations research (industrial engineering) grad, so SRI didn't have much use for me. I wish I had majored in electrical engineering instead of math as an undergraduate. Maybe I could have worked for SRI.