The Navy last week said it successfully conducted a third air and ballistic missile defense flight test set with the AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) on Thursday off the west coast of Hawaii.
This test, called Vigilant Talon, started when a short-range ballistic missile target and multiple air-to-surface cruise missile targets were launched simultaneously. The AMDR searched for, detected, and maintained tracking on all of the targets throughout their trajectories, the Navy said.
The preliminary data showed the test successfully met its primary objectives against the simultaneous targets. The Navy said program officials will continue to evaluate system performance based on telemetry and other data obtained during the test.
“This radar was specifically designed to handle ballistic missiles and cruise missiles simultaneously, and it’s doing just that,” Capt. Seiko Okano, major program manager for Above Water Sensors at Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems, said in a statement.
“AMDR is successfully demonstrating performance in a series of increasingly difficult test events and is on track to deliver advanced capability to the Navy’s first Flight III Destroyer,” he added.
SPY-6 is being developed by Raytheon [RTN] for the upcoming Flight III version of the Arleigh Burke-class DDG-51 destroyers. It is designed to provide increased range, sensitivity and discrimination accuracy compared to the SPY-1 radar used on existing DDG-51s.
This test comes a little over a month since the last AMDR test, in the same area. That test included just one medium-range ballistic missile target (Defense Daily, Aug. 4).
Raytheon won a $327 million contract modification in May for the first three low-rate initial production units of SPY-6 (Defense Daily, May 5). The company views this as a franchise program.