Collins Aerospace to deliver higher resolution on U.S. Navy maritime experimental flights

Collins Aerospace Systems, a unit of Raytheon Technologies Corp., has been awarded a $19.9 million contract by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) to conduct a maritime experiment of the company’s MS-177A long-range multi-spectral imaging sensor on a Navy flight test P-3C Orion aircraft. The experiment will mark the first time Collins Aerospace’s MS-177A has been flown by the Navy. The previous version of the sensor, the MS-177, has completed flight testing on the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Global Hawk and will soon go operational.

Over the course of the 30-month contract period, Collins Aerospace will fabricate an MS-177A sensor and supporting flight test hardware from its existing USAF production line and install it on the P-3C aircraft. The follow-on phase will encompass experimental flights in a maritime threat environment.  Results of the experiment will demonstrate the MS-177A’s ability to expand the Navy’s maritime ISR capabilities in the Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), Anti-Surface Warfare (ASuW) and Mine Warfare (MIW) mission domains using a mature USAF sensor system.

The MS-177A system employs design elements of Collins Aerospace’s fielded Senior Year Electro-optical Reconnaissance System (SYERS) sensor flown on the U-2 to deliver high geo-location accuracy, collecting imagery in the Visible, Near-IR, SWIR and MWIR spectral channels resulting in advanced terrestrial and maritime mission capabilities. The MS-177A sensor’s Field of View (FoV) and spectral and spatial resolution offer unmatched high-resolution, multi-spectral, high coverage rate airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capability to the U.S. military. Its long-range performance allows the host platform to operate in contested as well as permissive environments on both land and sea, day or night.

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