Lockheed Martin team to build LRDR
Lockheed Martin will lead a team to develop, build and test the Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) system as part of the country's layered Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) strategy under a contract awarded by the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
The nine-year contract, with options, has a potential value of around $784 million. The industry team includes deciBel research, Amec Foster Wheeler, ASRC Federal, IERUS Technologies, PENTA Research and Davidson Technologies.
The LRDR system is an S-band radar with solid-state gallium nitride components able to detect and discriminate threats at extremely long range. The completed system will have a solid-state active electronically-scanned antenna and a housing facility. It is expected to be ready for operational testing at the US Air Force's station in Clear, Alaska by 2020.
The wider BMDS will provide threat discrimination, tracking and acquisition data to enable separate defence systems to engage ballistic missile threats.
Carl Bannar, vice president of integrated warfare systems and sensors, Lockheed Martin, said: 'The US has a limited number of ground-based interceptors to detect threats, yet the number of potential missile threats - and countermeasures used to hide those threats - is growing. Our offering meets the MDA’s vision for LRDR by pairing innovative radar discrimination capability with proven ballistic missile defence algorithms.'
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