A helium-filled aerostat will be tethered inside an undisclosed military base in Singapore to provide high-resolution radar coverage of sea-space and airspace out to a 200km range.
Singapore’s Minister of Defence Ng Eng Hen announced on 28 October that the aerostat would be deployed to ‘improve our surveillance capabilities significantly’.
The 55m-long craft from TCOM in the US will operate from a maximum altitude of 600m.
Singapore’s existing radar coverage is seriously hampered by its small size and relatively low geographic features. For example, an FPS-117 radar is situated on Singapore’s second-highest natural feature, Bukit Gombak, which is just 133m