Sentinel A4

Lockheed Martin will finish contractor testing on the Sentinel A4 radar in May 2022 and send the first five systems to the US Army. (Photo provided by Lockheed Martin.)

SYRACUSE, NY: Lockheed Martin is preparing to deliver the first five Sentinel A4 radars to the US Army for formal testing next month while an additional five radars, which will be handed to operational Army units, are on schedule to be delivered in July 2023, a company official here told reporters.

Mark Mekker, Lockheed’s director for Army radar programs, said Monday the company remains ahead of schedule in producing the air and missile defense radar, which replaces the legacy Sentinel A3.

The five radars are on track to complete contractor testing and will move on to developmental and operational testing for the Army in May, which is planned to take between eight and 12 months, Mekker added.

Meanwhile, the Army decided last year it would order five additional units earlier than planned, dubbed user evaluation systems, to send directly to operational units to help soldiers begin training on the new radar while it is still undergoing government testing. Those additional units are scheduled for delivery in July 2023, Mekker said.

The Army in June 2021 identified the Sentinel radar as a “key enabler” tied directly to the service’s top modernization efforts, Inside Defense reported at the time.

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Under the service’s current contract with Lockheed, the Army can currently exercise options for another eight radars.

During a tour of both its Syracuse campus and a satellite site in Cazenovia, NY, the company showed the production lines for several military radar programs, including the Army’s Q-53 counterfire target acquisition radar and the Air Force’s new long-range radar, nicknamed 3DELRR. Lockheed Martin paid for reporters’ travel and hotel expenses to visit its Syracuse facility.

In Syracuse, the service’s first TPY-4 radar, which the Air Force last month selected for its 3DELRR program, was sitting in the company’s anechoic chamber, a unique room designed to both prevent echoes and contain the waves the radar gives off. Company officials explained one of the main purposes of the anechoic chamber was to provide a baseline of a radar’s capability so the company could compare its performance in a sterile environment against how it operates in a real-world scenario.

About 40 minutes away from the Syracuse campus sits the company’s Cazenovia testing site. The site itself is a relatively small and secluded space overlooking valleys in northern New York. When reporters arrived at Cazenovia, the company had one Q-53 radar and one TPS-77 long-range air surveillance radar set up at the site.

Off to the side from the two radars, which were flanked by a series of lightning arresting poles, as well as one worker who was actively updating the software on the TPS-77, sat a building for engineers to work from and a radome.

Buckley SFB Radomes

Radomes positioned at Buckley Space Force Base, CO. (U.S. Space Force Photo by Tech. Sgt. JT Armstrong)

The radome, a large, spherical enclosure that resembles a huge golf ball, is used primarily to operate radars without interference from the environment. Its unique shape is necessary to produce an optimal surface for the radar’s waves to penetrate the special material used to construct the building.

Company officials also said the valleys’ geography combined with unique structures scattered throughout them, such as wind farms, made it ideal for testing military radars, which need to be able to distinguish useful targets from other clutter in a variety of conditions.

Off in the distance, a small white building can be seen sitting in one of the valleys. A Lockheed official said that building was the company’s random target generator, a facility equipped to send out its own waves that can mimic the appearance of a useful target and give another radar a specific entity to detect and track.