ATK artillery precision guidance kit completes tests
ATK's artillery Precision Guidance Kit (PGK) has completed first article acceptance tests and has been approved for low-rate initial production, the company announced on 6 February.
The PGK completed performance and safety tests at the Yuma proving grounds in Arizona. Now approved, it will help reduce dispersion of conventional artillery projectiles to 30m or less and enable more accurate artillery usage.
PGK is a guidance fuze fitting in the fuze well of 155mm, high-explosive artillery projectiles. It performs in-flight course corrections for significantly improved precision. The ATK PGK design features a fixed-canard guidance and control approach with a self-generated power supply and with gun-hardened electronics. The PGK fuze performs all standard fuze functions and also includes a 'fail safe' option in which a PGK-equipped artillery round will not detonate if it is not close enough to the target.
During the testing, PGK-fuzed rounds were fired from the M777A2 155mm lightweight towed Howitzer and M109A6 Paladin 155mm self-propelled Howitzer. It passed the accuracy objective requirement of 30m circular error or less, with most rounds placed within 10m of the target.
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