Lockheed Completes First of New Air Force Radars.

• Author: Easley, Mikayla
• Position: NEWS BRIEFS

* SYRACUSE, New York--Lockheed Martin has wrapped up production of the first of the Air Force's new long-range air defense radars, the company recently announced.

In March, the Air Force announced it had selected the AN/TPY-4 for the Three Dimensional Expeditionary Long Range Radar, or 3DELRR, rapid prototyping program worth $8.4 million. The new ground-based radar is able to detect and track current and emerging threats, from small unmanned aerial vehicles to tactical ballistic missiles at great distances, said Rick Herodes, director of ground-based air surveillance radars at Lockheed Martin.

What sets the TPY-4 apart from other radars on the market is its software-forward design, Herodes said.

"If you imagine older style radars as putting out beams and receiving energy back, they kind of did it as an entire antenna," he told reporters during a tour of Lockheed Martin's facility in Syracuse, New York.

The TPY-4 radar, however, has more than 1,000 individual mini-radars the size of a hockey puck that can be independently and digitally controlled, Herodes said. This allows users to make software changes without altering the radar's hardware, he said.

"Each one of those pucks can transmit independently and receive independently and act as its own radar. So, we could change how the radar transmits and receives so that part of the antenna can do one thing and another part of the antenna could do another," he said.

The open architecture also gives the radar additional flexibility to detect the specific threat a user is facing, he added.

Chandra Marshall, vice president of radar and sensors systems at Lockheed Martin, noted the software-defined architecture will allow future users to easily keep the radar relevant as threats evolve in the future.

"That capability allows them to not have to...