Raytheon [RTN] delivered the first AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) array to the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii for use in an upcoming initial radar light-off live target test, the company said Thursday.
Delivered ahead of schedule, the radar is currently being installed at the facility according to plan with a test set for early this month. The SPY-6(V) is a next-generation integrated air and ballistic missile defense radar set for use in the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet.
This is the first scalable radar, built with Radar Modular Assemblies (RMA) or radar building blocks. Each individual RMA is roughly two feet cubed in size and is a standalone radar that can be grouped to build any size radar aperture. All of the cooling, power, command logic and software are also scalable, allowing for new instantiations without significant radar development costs, Raytheon said.
The SPY-6(V) is currently advancing through the engineering and manufacturing development phase, which is nearly 80 percent complete. Raytheon highlighted that it has concluded design, fabrication, and initial testing in under 30 months. The SPY-6(V) is set to soon transition to Low Rate Initial Production and the radar is on track for delivery in 2019 to the first DDG-51 Flight III destroyer.
“Several months of testing at our near-field range facility, where the array completed characterization and calibration, have proven the system ready for live target tracking,” Tad Dickenson, Raytheon AMDR program director, said in a statement.
“The array was the last component to ship. With all other components, including the back-end processing equipment, delivered earlier and already integrated at the range, AMDR will be up and running in short order,” he added.
Capt. Seiko Okano, major program manager of Above Water Sensors (IWS 2.0), affirmed the performance and timelines of the system so far.
“The extensive testing to date has demonstrated good compliance to the radar’s key technical performance parameters. The technologies are proven mature and ready for testing in the far-field range, against live targets, to verify and validate the radar’s exceptional capabilities,” Okano said in a statement.