By Marina Malenic
Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] effort to upgrade the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber’s computer and electronics systems is well under way, the company said recently.
“We’ve never had a processor upgrade,” Dave Mazur, vice president of long-range strike at Northrop Grumman, told reporters during a Sept. 17 briefing at the Air Force Association’s annual conference in Washington.
“The iPod you carry around has more processing power than a computer on a B-2,” he added.
The aircraft has been in the Air Force fleet for almost 20 years, and this is the first time the service has upgraded its flight computers, radar, communications equipment and even cockpit displays.
Processors, disc drives and fiber-optics cables are scheduled to be installed, and nine flat-panel digital displays will give the cockpits new reception capability, Mazur said.
Two new extremely high-frequency satellite dishes will also be installed by 2013 to provide a satellite link. The aircraft’s center fuselage will be cut open for the installation. The fuselage will also receive an “advanced topcoat system” to improve stealth and maintenance.
The company is already flight testing a newly installed digital electronically scanned array radar. The entire fleet is expected to be equipped by 2013, according to company officials. The contract for the upgrades is worth just over $1.14 billion, officials said.
Mazur explained that the X-band frequency used by the aircraft’s legacy radar has been sold to a commercial user, making the upgrade necessary.
In a separate upgrade, the bomber will also get 64 laser-guided Small Diameter Bombs for use against moving targets, Northrop Grumman officials said.
Meanwhile, the Air Force is continuing to explore the possibility of using the B-2 to drop the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), according to officials. The 30,000-pound bomb was designed to penetrate hardened and deeply buried targets with over two tons of explosives and will be tested this fall using the B-52 bomber, Air Force officials said.
The service is developing the MOP along with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The munition is being built by Boeing [BA] and is so large that the B-2A and B-52H bombers are the only aircraft in the U.S. fleet capable of carrying it.
“We have laid in a program, a follow-on to DTRA’s demonstration on the B-52,” John Corley, director of the Capabilities Integration Directorate at the Air Armament Center (AAC), Eglin AFB, Fla., said last year. “We have been working with the B-2 [system program office] to integrate MOP onto the B-2” (Defense Daily, Nov. 15, 2007).
One official confirmed that that effort is ongoing at this time.
The notional planning calls for procuring 10 MOPs, with an option for 10 more, plus an additional five to support developmental testing on the B-2, Corley said at the time.
The munition was designed to destroy facilities used by “hostile states” to store nuclear weapons, one Air Force source tells Defense Daily. Central Command, which has responsibility for the Middle East, issued the urgent need for the weapon.