Success Less Than Five Months from Contract Award

Raytheon has completed the first round of testing of the first partially-populated radar antenna array for the US Army’s Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor (LTAMDS), the company announced on 17 March.

The milestone comes less than five months after the Army selected Raytheon to build LTAMDS, a next-generation radar that will defeat advanced threats like hypersonic weapons.

“Concluding these initial tests brings Raytheon one step closer to putting LTAMDS into the hands of service members,” stated Tom Laliberty, Vice President of Integrated Air and Missile Defense at Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems business. “Raytheon and our supplier partners continue to make the right investments in people, technology and manufacturing capability to ensure we meet the US Army’s Urgent Materiel Release.”

The testing consisted of calibrating LTAMDS’ primary antenna array in an indoor, climate-controlled test range and evaluating its performance against simulated targets. With testing complete, the array is being mounted on a precision-machined enclosure for integration and further evaluation. It will then commence testing at an outdoor range against real-world targets.

LTAMDS consists of a primary antenna array on the front of the radar and two secondary arrays on the rear. The radar antennas work together to enable operators to simultaneously detect and engage multiple threats from any direction, ensuring there are no blind spots on the battlefield. The primary array is roughly the same size as the PATRIOT array, but provides more than twice that system’s performance. While it is designed for the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense system, LTAMDS will also be able to preserve previous PATRIOT investments.

Raytheon is working closely with hundreds of suppliers across 42 states, including a core team that features: Crane Aerospace & Electronics; Cummings Aerospace; IERUS Technologies; KORD Technologies; Mercury Systems; and nLogic.