tioned very-large-aperture Cobra
Judy S-band radar. The company
also is building the SPQ-9B X-band
radar for the Ship Self-Defense
System used on aircraft carriers and
amphibious warfare ships and being
incorporated on Ticonderoga-class
cruisers as part of the Cruiser
Modernization Program.
For the AMDR, NGES is focusing on active electronically scanned
arrays with digital beam forming.
“We’re looking at how we can
better architect it,” Brinkman said,
including the processing area “where
we really want to be able to do rapid
tech insertions as we go forward.
There’s an enterprise approach to
developing these types of radars that
we’re taking that applies in the airborne as well as in the shipboard.
“We firmly believe that the approaching capabilities
and the things that we’re doing on the airborne side apply
to keeping the costs under control and getting the performance up on the shipboard side, as opposed to having
dedicated production lines with higher levels of overhead
for ship-based systems,” he said.
AMDR is envisioned to be scalable to accommodate
mission requirements for various ships. Scalability will
allow the Navy to size the same radar design to fit on
ships of different tonnage and configuration.
“Scalability is one of the major challenges in the
early phases of the program,” Razavian said. “The concept studies and technical development phase have
been designed to successfully demonstrate scalability
early in the AMDR program.”
“The limiting factors will be how much power in
the cooling the ship and how much footprint the radar
will take up on the ship,” Smith said. “Also, cost,
because the bigger the array, generally speaking, the
more it costs.”
The three six-month concept studies will be submitted this fall to the Navy’s program office.
“If the government makes the decision to proceed at
Milestone A, the program will proceed to the technology development phase, which will include component and prototype testing,” Razavian said.
The technology development phase is planned for
2010 to 2012. The government then will make a
Milestone B decision whether to proceed with engineering and manufacturing development, planned for
2010 to 2016. At that point, Milestone C, the government could decide to proceed with low-rate initial
production. ■
U.S. NAVY
The companies developing the Air and Missile Defense Radar concepts are currently working on radar and equipment for the Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyer program, illustrated here, the Cobra Judy missile-range instrumentation ship, or both.
sensitivity and resistance to natural and man-made environments are required.”
Technologies being looked at by Raytheon include
wafer technology — from basic chips to signal processing — in computer systems.
“We’ve been engaged in a ton of research over the last
five or 10 years, both internally and some cooperation/
collaboration with universities and government, about
how to advance the potential for the systems,” Smith said.
“You don’t want to grow the size because size drives cost.
Technologies can be used to produce more power [and]
greater sensitivity, but stay within a confined footprint in
terms of power, cooling and size.
“We have teamed with Bath Iron Works [in Bath,
Maine], so we have a shipyard on our team to help us in
terms of scoping the ship impact, doing the sensitivities
analysis of scale and all those kind of things,” Smith said.
Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems (NGES) in
Linthicum Heights, Md., is applying its experience in
airborne radars to address the shipboard AMDR
requirements.
“The Navy got us engaged with a very large S-band
radar program and, also, in parallel, started funding us
to really apply some of the airborne capabilities … to
drive the costs out of the shipboard radars’ performance,” said Chuck Brinkman, vice president and general manager of the Advanced Concepts and Technology
Division of NGES. “It really started by flying some of
those airborne capabilities. The Navy thought we
could bring some real novel approaches to driving the
cost out and creating a real viable competitor.”
Northrop Grumman has extensive experience in shipboard navigation radars and is building the aforemen-
