Raytheon Moving Out On Air Missile Defense Radar

Raytheon's air missile defense radar is meant to increase detection range, according to the company. (Raytheon illustration)

Apr. 8, 2014 - By CHRISTOPHER P. CAVAS – Defense News

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD. — With a temporary work stoppage lifted, Raytheon is working to develop its air missile defense radar (AMDR) for the US Navy’s future Aegis destroyers.

“We’re two months into the contract, but we’re more than two years into technical development,” Tad Dickinson, Raytheon’s AMDR program manager, said at the Navy League’s Sea-Air-Space Exposition outside Washington.

The company already has built a test array structure, a roughly 14-by-14-foot array to check fittings of the components of the electrically scanned radar, which will replace SPY-1 radars used on today’s Aegis ships.

The S-band AMDR will have more than 30 times the sensitivity of the SPY-1, and is designed to dramatically increase the fidelity of the system to track ballistic missile targets.

Raytheon beat proposals from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to win the AMDR contract. Work was temporarily halted when Lockheed filed a protest, but the work stoppage ended in January when the protest was dropped. Raytheon and Lockheed will both work on AMDR, which will be integrated into the Lockheed Aegis system.

Raytheon is working toward the program’s first critical design review, scheduled for November. The system is intended to be installed in the yet-to-be-named DDG 124, a destroyer to be funded in 2016. Delivery of the first set of AMDR radars is scheduled for 2019, Dickinson said.