The U.S. Navy will outfit each floor ship in its fleet – from small patrol vessels to mammoth plane carriers – with new radars that may discover and observe enemy missiles and planes concurrently, beneath a brand new $651 million contract with Raytheon Missiles & Protection. The contract contains choices, if exercised, that may convey the cumulative worth of the award to $3.16 billion. With the award, Raytheon Missiles & Protection, a Raytheon Applied sciences enterprise, will present {hardware}, manufacturing and sustainment for the SPY-6 household of radars. The radars will enable sailors to seek out threats, together with hypersonic weapons, at higher distances, and to react quicker to them. In 2021, the Navy started putting in the primary SPY-6 radar on its new, high-tech Aegis Flight III, the usJack H. Lucas (DDG 125). Every SPY-6 radar for the DDG class ship contains 4 arrays, an influence system, a cooling system, and a back-end processor to compute array indicators.
“There is no such thing as a different radar with the floor maritime capabilities of SPY-6, and this award highlights the significance of its design and future manufacturing for the Navy,” mentioned Wes Kremer, president of Raytheon Missiles & Protection. “SPY-6 is essentially the most superior naval radar in existence, and it’ll present a large leap ahead in functionality for the navy for many years to come back.”
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“It’s an unlimited enchancment over what the U.S. Navy presently has on it ships,” mentioned Kim Ernzen, Naval Energy president at Raytheon Missiles & Protection. “It’s like going from a pen gentle to an enormous flashlight.”
“We will scale it for frigates and different courses of ships,” mentioned Scott Spence, program space director for naval radars at Raytheon Missiles & Protection. “And, we will add capabilities throughout all these platforms very seamlessly and shortly.”
SPY-6 can be the Navy’s first actually scalable radar, making it simple to configure to any kind of ship. It’s constructed with particular person ‘constructing blocks’ known as radar modular assemblies. Every RMA is a self-contained radar antenna in a 2’x2’x2’ field. The RMAs can stack collectively to kind an array of practically any dimension to suit the mission necessities of any ship. By the tip of the contract, the radar shall be on greater than 45 ships throughout the Navy. The radars’ frequent software program baseline makes them simple to improve, with out the necessity to set up new {hardware}. Underneath a separate integration and manufacturing assist contract, Raytheon Missiles & Protection will ship software program upgrades over the SPY-6 household’s lifetime. Raytheon Missiles & Protection has invested greater than $500 million in infrastructure and capability enhancements for SPY-6, together with superior automation expertise at its 30,000 square-foot Radar Growth Facility. The enterprise used its Immersive Design Middle to configure the manufacturing facility and refine processes to ship quicker and higher.
Whereas assembly manufacturing calls for, Raytheon Missiles & Protection continues to work with the Navy to enhance the radar. In 2021, the enterprise and Workplace of Naval Analysis examined new distributed sensing software program for the SPY-6 radar. The demonstration helps the Navy’s purpose of making distributed sensing networks to defend towards evolving threats. Earlier, Raytheon Missiles & Protection and the Navy accomplished testing on the Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar, or EASR, on the Navy’s Wallops Island Check Facility in Virginia. The SPY-6(V)2 rotating radar and SPY-6(V)3 fixed-face radar are recognized collectively as EASR. The exams centered on anti-air warfare and air visitors management capabilities, climate operations, and energy techniques for each radars. The EASR will exchange single-function legacy radars and enhance vary and efficiency.
