Ross Wilkers
Northrop Grumman will provide the U.S. Army 44 wide area surveillance radars for General Atomics-made Gray Eagle drones, increasing the total number of radars under contract to 174.
Northrop said the Army exercised an additional contract option, where STARLite radar deliveries will begin in April 2013 and complete in March 2014
Warfighters on the ground use STARLite to obtain airborne intelligence, said Steve McCoy, vice president for tactical sensor solutions.
STARLite, the Army’s radar program of record for the MQ-1C Gray Eagle, contains an synthetic aperture radar, ground moving target indicator and a dismount moving target indicator.
The company has provided STARLite for digital interoperability demonstrations at Camp Roberts in California, where it demonstrated data sharing across a network and cued non-collated sensors.
Both manned and unmanned aircraft system platforms use the 65-pound radar for tactical reconnaissance, wide area surveillance and target detection in several different types of weather conditions.
Northrop has developed an aperture system and an active electronically scanned array radar for the Lockheed Martin-made F-35 jet.
