ROBOT PLANE SENSORS OK'D.Byline: Daily News PALMDALE - Northrop Grumman Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) is an aerospace and defense conglomerate that is the result of the 1994 purchase of Grumman by Northrop. The company is the third largest defense contractor for the U.S. Corp. has completed acceptance testing (programming) acceptance testing - Formal testing conducted to determine whether a system satisfies its acceptance criteria and thus whether the customer should accept the system. of the first production version of new integrated sensors for the Global Hawk robot reconnaissance plane, the program manager said. The sensor package includes electro-optical and infrared cameras and synthetic aperture radar Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Radar, airborne or satellite-borne, that uses special signal processing to produce high-resolution images of the surface of the Earth (or another object) while traversing a considerable flight path. , produced by Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems (SAS) is a major business segment of Raytheon. Headquartered in El Segundo, California, SAS has a total employment of 12,000 and 2006 sales of US$ 4.3 billion. Jon Jones is the segment's President. . ``The installation of this new sensor package on Global Hawk is a significant milestone for the program,'' said George Guerra, Northrop Grumman's Air Force Global Hawk program manager. ``The imagery provided by this sensor, even under the worst imaginable i·mag·i·na·ble adj. Conceivable in the imagination: imaginable exploits. i·mag environmental conditions on the ground, will go a long way in meeting the needs of the war fighter.'' The new sensor package features improvements derived from technology developed for and used on Lockheed Martin's U-2 spy planes. Northrop Grumman expects to accept several more production sensor suites from Raytheon later this year. Two RQ-4A Global Hawks with the new production sensor suites are expected to enter active duty this fall. Pre-production Global Hawks have already flown more than 4,500 hours in combat over Afghanistan and Iraq, even though they were still in development. A Global Hawk plane flies under computer guidance at an altitude of at least 60,000 feet, above bad weather and prevailing winds The prevailing winds are the trends in speed and direction of wind over a particular point on the earth's surface. A region's prevailing winds often show global patterns of movement in the earth's atmosphere. Prevailing winds are the causes of waves as they push the ocean. , for more than 35 hours. During a mission, it can transmit images taken over an area about the size of Illinois. Northrop Grumman assembles the planes in Palmdale. |
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