Raytheon
Company, in collaboration with the U.S. Navy, successfully demonstrated
an end to end, first of its kind, integrated electronic attack system
during flight tests at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in October.
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"Eight
months after award of the NGJ program we successfully flew the integrated
prototype system against representative threat radars," said Travis
Slocumb, vice president of Electronic Warfare Systems at Raytheon's
Space and Airborne Systems business. "This demonstrates the capability
and readiness of the core enabling technologies for the next generation
of EW systems, and we did it on our first flight."
The advanced, first of its kind system consisted of an active electronically
scanned array (AESA), an all-digital, open, scalable receiver and techniques
generator and a self-powered pod mounted on the underside of a Gulfstream
business jet. The high power AESA front end and multichannel techniques
generator are common building blocks not just for the U.S. Navy's Next
Generation Jammer, but also for other airborne, maritime and ground-based
EW systems.
A team of engineering and technical personnel collected and evaluated
test data confirming the successful jamming and disruption of air defense
radars, which were representative of enemy threat radars. The combination
of jamming techniques, beam agility, array-transmit power and jammer
management were very effective against the threat systems and all test
objectives were met or exceeded.
A primary goal of the flight test activity, based at Naval Air Station
Point Mugu, was to reduce risk in the engineering, manufacturing and
development (EMD) phase of the Next Generation Jammer acquisition by
the U.S. Navy. While all the elements had been previously tested in
a lab setting, this was the first time the end-to-end system had been
powered by the air stream. |
