Air Force Moves Ahead With Void-Sensing Fuze.

A new fuze from Orbital ATK will soon be installed on block-penetrating bombs used by the Air Force and Navy.

The Dulles, Virginia-based aerospace and defense technology company recently announced it received a $23 million Air Force contract to move ahead with full-rate production of its FMU 167/B hard target void-sensing fuze, or HTVSF.

The HTVSF is all-electronic, cockpit-programmable and capable of destroying deeply buried and hard targets, said Dave Fine, vice president of fuzing and warheads for Orbital ATK Defense Systems. It provides multiple delay arming and detonation times, as well as a void-sensing capability, which allows for precision activation of the fuze.

The innovative technology "takes the guesswork out of understanding the timing required to reach the target," Fine said. "It's a very, very survivable, robust fuze in terms of being able to survive going through these very hard, buried targets, but it also can detect very minute changes in its environment" to perceive the strike location, he added.

Orbital incorporated advanced signal processing and algorithms to analyze the targets and built robust packaging to allow the munition to penetrate deeply, he noted.

"You might just have a deeply buried facility protected by earth and concrete," he said. "You might have a multi-layered target... [such as] a complex facility buried underground that has 10 stories, and you might decide the critical mission space is in the fifth story. So the fuze...