Time on Target: Seeing is Believing

Your ship is cruising off the coast in waters contested by other naval powers and by insurgent forces on shore.

A swarm of drones—some possibly armed and ready to explode on contact with your ship—home in on your bridge.

Your radar detects them when, suddenly, a low-flying hypervelocity missile, coming in at Mach4+,  emerges over the horizon to target your stern.

Not long ago, you would not have had even the two seconds necessary for your defences to process information fast enough for reaction against even one of these simultaneous threats.

However, today, the latest generation of ‘4D’ air and surface surveillance radar from Thales provides systems with ten times more time on target.

“Time and quality of information are your critical allies when facing the new array of unpredictable simultaneous threats” says Rene de Jongh, Surface Radar Strategy Director at Thales, “That means having maximum time on target for your equipment to evaluate the threat and take countermeasures while, at the same time, understanding what is around you to safeguard yourself and protect your own allied forces”.

The nature of those threats has never been more varied nor more challenging. They range from the hypervelocity anti-ship missiles, to robotic warfare and swarm attacks, to electronic warfare (jamming), detection and tracking by space-based sensors as well as, overall, having to operate in a simultaneously conventional, asymmetric and hybrid threat environment.

Thales’ latest ‘4D’ radars not only provide bearing, range and elevation (3D), but also in-depth analysis of the target’s Doppler signature and other characteristics during that extended time on target (the 4th dimension) within every single scan. The result is vastly-superior air and surface detection, tracking and classification performance and weapon support whether compared to 3D and 2D radars.

So Thales new generation of 4D radar enables the crewto detect, track and identify any threat and make the right decisions at every decisive moment. And by going to a digital software-defined future-proof radar architecture, with inherent scalability and upgradability, navies will be ready for whatever the future may bring.

Processing power of 40 DVD’s of information per second

The latest member of this new radar family is the NS50. Launched in October 2018, the compact unit assures that even smaller naval vessels can benefit from the few seconds of critical time needed to react to the threats simultaneously, while maintaining the same high refresh rate for quality information on the surrounding environment.

Thanks to their innovative architectures, including the SMART-L radar with its ability to process data of forty DVD’s per second, and their more intelligent miniaturised antenna, the new Thales naval radar generation brings to bear 4D where 3D and 2D were standard. So the NS50 , and other radars in this latest generation from Thales, provides a longer time on target and a higher level of information than was previously accessible.

“Navies must be able to rely on digital technologies to guarantee the full performance of sensors on board in real time and at all times. They know that they can count on our latest radars to give them the quality information they need when they don’t have time to react but must trust their equipment.”, concludes Rene de Jongh, “They understand that they are buying a Thales radar track record of higher quality of information and a faster refresh rate. So it’s not a surprise that we serve more than 40 navies worldwide with radars as well as 25 navies with turnkey combat management”.