Lockheed Martin has revealed more details regarding its US Army Lower Tier Air and Missile Defence Sensor radar offering.

Lockheed Martin has provided MONS with details regarding its offering for the US Army’s Lower Tier Air and Missile Defence Sensor (LTAMDS) requirement. 

The LTAMDS requirement aims to field a new ground-based air surveillance radar for the US Army to replace the force’s existing Raytheon AN/MPQ-65 C-band (5.25-5.925 gigahertz/GHz) ground-based air surveillance radar which equips the force’s Raytheon MIM-104 family surface-to-air missile batteries. According to published reports, the army is looking for a radar capable of performing 360 degree surveillance. Although the full LTAMDS timeline has yet to be revealed, the army has disclosed that it plans to analyse available technologies by the end of 2018.

Lockheed Martin told MONS that its offering is focused on the firm’s Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) Radar for Engagement and Surveillance; collectively known as the ARES. The company disclosed in a written statement that its design uses a dual band approach and, while the firm demurred from detailing the radar’s specific transmission frequencies, it did disclose that it will use wideband technology to enable simultaneous long-range tracking and fire control. Moreover, the firm has not disclosed information regarding the radar’s range. That said, Lockheed Martin did state that technology the firm has developed for its AN/TPS-59 and AN/TPS-77 L-band (1.215-1.4GHz) ground-based air surveillance radars, alongside the firm’s AN/TPQ-53 S-band (2.3-2.5/2.7-3.7GHz) counter rocket, artillery and mortar radar would be used in the ARES design, with Gallium Nitride in the radar’s transmit/receive modules. Finally, the firm stressed that “ARES is not the final and complete system, but it gives an idea of our LTAMDS solution we can later scale using our modular architecture to final system requirements.”

Thomas Withington, Toulouse.