Leonardo's "Seaspray" AESA maritime surveillance radar will be integrated on GA-ASI's MQ-9B "SeaGuardian" drone

(To Leonardo)
18/01/21

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) is working with Leonardo to integrate Leonardo's Seaspray 7500E V2 radar into the central pod of its Remotely Piloted Air Systems (RPAS) MQ-9B SeaGuardian. The installation of this market-leading sensor in the SeaGuardian will enable a persistent maritime intelligence and surveillance capability, available to GA-ASI's international customer base.

GA-ASI's MQ-9B is revolutionizing the long-persistence RPAS industry by providing all-time capability and compliance to STANAG-4671, NATO's standard for airworthiness of remotely piloted aircraft. These features, together with an operationally tested anti-collision radar, enable flexible operations in civilian airspace.
The SeaGuardian is equipped with a multi-function maritime surface patrol radar capable of providing reverse aperture images (Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar - ISAR), with an Automatic Identification System (AIS) receiver and with a sensor high definition video full motion equipped with optical and infrared cameras. The suite of sensors, enhanced by automatic track correlation capability and anomaly detection algorithms, enables real-time detection and identification of surface naval units over thousands of square nautical miles.

The Seaspray 7500E V2 radar is compatible with the SeaGuardian mission set, using Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar technology to detect, track and classify hundreds of maritime contacts. The integration also includes an Open Mission Systems (OMS), which allows the SeaGuardian and its suite of sensors to offer great flexibility in both operations and system support.

Many countries use Leonardo's Seaspray E-Scanning Radar, and the company has used customer operational feedback to expand and optimize the suite in advanced ways. Among these, the patented ability to detect small targets, allowing you to accurately identify particularly difficult targets at long distances, such as submarine periscopes and shipwrecked persons, even in stormy sea conditions. A discriminating factor of Leonardo's E-scan radars is their high reliability and tolerance to malfunctions which allow them to operate effectively even in the absence of a certain number of radar modules.

The Seaspray considerably increases the capabilities of the MQ-9B, based on the proven collaboration between GA-ASI and Leonardo. Earlier this year, GA-ASI announced the completion of the initial integration of the SAGE electronic surveillance system on SeaGuardian, which provided the aircraft with the ability to gather intelligence information from large-area marine and land-based radar emitters.

For the SeaGuardian platform, customers will be able to rely on a wide range of sensors and payloads, with Seaspray and SAGE as options off the shelf.