MELBOURNE, Australia — Lockheed Martin, in partnership with Australia's Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group, is developing enhancements for the next generation of Over-the-Horizon Radar (OTHR) to detect and track small, fast-moving targets at extremely long ranges and at night.
The US defense giant has invested in the Australian Research and Development (R&D) Programme with a view to selling the capability in the international market place, including the United States. The defense-industry team announced the successful completion of Phase 1 of validation work on what is known as Project Coorong on June 8.
"From a Lockheed Martin perspective, a lot of the problems that DST Group had identified in that area is really about a problem space that one of our international customers would potentially want resolved in the next-generation Over-the-Horizon Radar," said Jack Mahoney, Lockheed Martin Australia's general manager.
Mahoney pointed to Brazil’s Sistema de Gerenciamento do Amazonia Azul (SisGAAz) maritime awareness program of 2014 as an example of the applications the company sees for Project Coorong in the export market.
"This technology could have been applicable to that space as well, but at the same time the US was also clearly interested in trying to understand how OTHR fits into their layer of systems-of-systems, from a detection perspective," Mahoney said.
"We've been chasing some international markets for around ten years. Modeling has suggested that this solution is the way the problem could be solved, and we've now fielded the technology that is helping us to prove that modeling. If the experiment proves true over the next year, potentially this type of system would have a direct appeal to the US.
"It's about now being able to sit with potential customers and ask them about their problem space, and then tell them we might have the capability to allow them to solve those problems."
OTHRs typically operate at lower frequencies during night hours, due to a diminished ionosphere, and this significantly reduces the radar cross section of small targets, such as cruise missiles.
The work was initiated by a Royal Australian Air Force requirement to detect and track targets such as the next generation of hypersonic cruise missiles.
The R&D work is now validating years of modeling conducted by DST Group, but Gordon Frazer, acting chief of DST Group's Cyber and Electronic Warfare Division, said the project had to be placed in mothballs in order to concentrate on work to support the upgrade of Australia’s operational Jindalee Operational Radar Network Over the horizon Radar Network (JORN).
However the project was revived following a strategic partnering alliance between DST Group and Lockheed Martin in 2014.
"We were in the situation where we'd done a lot of work. We were pleased with what we'd done [but] we would have liked to have validated it to get that closure," Frazer said. "We exposed it to Lockheed Martin and they indicated that they could help us. DST Group is delighted that something we've done has gone so smoothly into industry and we've also been delighted with the relationship we have."
Nigel Pittaway is the Australia correspondent for Defense News.
