General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) successfully demonstrated the ability of its Lynx Multi-Mode Radar to detect and image very small vessels during the Navy’s Trident Warrior 2012, the company said in a statement.
The Lynx was able to detect such vessels as fast boats, sail boats and fishing boats using its Maritime Wide Area Search (MWAS) mode. GA-ASI’s Claw sensor payload operator control software cued the Lynx MWAS radar to targets in coordination with the Navy’s AquaQuIPS multi-INT, ship track data fusion engine developed by Jove Sciences Inc. AquaQuIPS generated a Common Operational Picture by utilizing intelligence received from multiple systems, including Claw.
The Lynx MWAS was integrated aboard a Predator B remotely piloted aircraft surrogate (King Air 200).
“GA-ASI’s primary goal was to provide day/night Lynx radar and Electro-Optical Infrared (EO/IR) data on maritime targets in support of the AquaQuIPS Fly on Top Operation objective,” Linden Blue, GA-ASI’s president of reconnaissance systems, said in a statement. “We succeeded in measuring the ability to cue the RPA using information from multiple national resources, to locate specific targets and to transmit image/video data back to the shore command and control data-fusion site and Global Command and Control System-Maritime.”
The missions, including a real-world night surveillance flight, were executed with success and demonstrated the ability to provide situational awareness and surveillance data of a large littoral/maritime area. They also demonstrated the ability to detect, classify and identify maritime targets in various weather conditions.
GA-ASI also achieved a historical first by demonstrating Lynx MWAS’ ability to support anti-piracy and counter-narcotics missions by detecting hard to find targets and relaying their imagery with metadata back to Navy commanders for dissemination and action.
Capable of a 30-degree per second scan rate with algorithms optimized for detecting small vessels, including Self-Propelled Semi-Submersible (SPSS) vessels, Lynx MWAS has also been demonstrated successfully on an aerostat, which is a tethered blimp-like airvehicle that remains aloft primarily through the use of buoyant lighter-than-air gases. The MWAS mode, along with a three-fold increase in the Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) area coverage rate and a new SAR-aided alignment mode, has been incorporated into Lynx radars deployed by United States customers over the past two years.
Trident Warrior is the annual exercise in the Navy’s primary FORCEnet Sea Trial experiment series and is designed to evaluate emerging technologies and network-centric toolsets to enhance situational awareness for decision-makers across all levels of the naval chain of command.