Jane Edwards
RTX business Raytheon has handed over to the Missile Defense Agency the first AN/TPY-2 radar equipped with a Gallium Nitride, or GaN, populated array that provides greater sensitivity to expand surveillance capacity and increase range.
RTX said Monday the AN/TPY-2 missile defense radar operates in the X-band of the electromagnetic spectrum and is designed to detect, track and discriminate ballistic missiles in multiple flight phases.
The radar system features the CX6 high-performance computing software that provides protection against electronic attacks and offers precision target discrimination capability.
Supporting Hypersonic Defense Mission
Jon Norman, Raytheon’s vice president for air and space defense systems requirements and capabilities, said the new AN/TPY-2 version has a longer range; can be fielded as a standalone, mobile unit; and can provide targeting coordinates to other missile defense interceptors beyond the U.S. Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, batteries, Breaking Defense reported Monday.
“What the TPY-2 does now, with the Gallium Nitride front-end in it, is it can see things twice as far, so we can make that command and control decision a lot earlier on which effector to use, whether it’s an SM series or it’s a Patriot, or it’s a THAAD,” Norman told Breaking Defense.
The Raytheon official noted that the combination of better discrimination and greater range capability enables the upgraded AN/TPY-2 radar to quickly detect and track hypersonic missiles.
The radar can now “detect these very, very small targets, and you can detect them at the separation when the booster separates from the warhead,” Norman stated.
He said the latest delivery was the 13th AN/TPY-2 radar that MDA received from Raytheon, but it was the first system with the GaN array.
