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Northrop Grumman
Achieves Major Milestones On MQ-4C Unmanned Aircraft By Steve Hall |
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February 28, 2012 - Northrop Grumman has commenced flight tests of the first developmental multifunction active sensor (MFAS) radar destined for the U.S. Navy's MQ-4C Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Unmanned Aircraft System (BAMS UAS).
The MFAS sensor has been integrated into the company's
Gulfstream II testbed aircraft based in Palmdale,
Calif., for flight testing after having completed ground
station testing in late November at the company's
Electronics Systems facility in Norwalk, Conn.
Marking another milestone, the first BAMS aircraft has
received its wings and is standing on its own gear at
the company's Palmdale Manufacturing Center in
California. |
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"These
two important milestones demonstrate continued program
maturity leading us to first flight later this year," said
Duke Dufresne, sector vice president and Unmanned Systems
general manager. "Our unmanned systems are providing the
U.S. Navy and other customers with affordable, combat-proven
high altitude, long endurance intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance solutions."
Over the next several months, testing of the
MFAS radar will be broken down into three phases; radar
integration, mode integration and refinement, and data
collection. Each phase tests the various capabilities and modes
of the radar that will be used by the Navy to provide a
persistent common picture of the maritime surface traffic. "The MFAS sensor is the first radar system
to provide full 360-degree persistent coverage of both open
oceans and littoral regions from extremely long ranges," said
Paul "Buz" Kalafos, vice president of Surveillance Systems. "The
MFAS radar sensor will set the standard in maritime
surveillance." The MFAS sensor operates with a rotating sensor that incorporates electronic scanning and provides mode agility to switch between various surveillance methods. These include maritime-surface-search (MSS) mode for tracking maritime targets and inverse-synthetic-aperture radar (ISAR) mode for classifying ships. |
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