Raytheon has been awarded a $7.4 million Air Force contract for sensors for surveillance satellites.
Raytheon will support the Focused Opportunity Reaching Toward Reliable Electro-Optic Strategic Sensors (FORTRESS) program. The company will "work to advance and maintain the state-of-the-art, scientific knowledge, growth, processing, characterization capability associated with low noise infrared sensor chip assemblies used for National Strategic Space," according to the Department of Defense contract announcement.
The Air Force Research Laboratory contract is scheduled to be completed by July 2019.
Money is coming, but not exactly at the level or timing that Marine leaders have wanted.
The service wants to use sensors to "see" across the larger distances expected for future battles. And deeper sensing makes more data to process and understand.
The sensors will be part of the Army’s High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (HADES), an undetermined aircraft that will be one piece of the service's family of deep-sensing systems.
The Navy is upgrading its fleet of underwater sensing drones.
Radar engineers on the sixth-generation Tempest fighter program say they will break data-processing records by way of miniaturization and going digital.