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01 Nov 07. The first SMART-S Mk2 surveillance radar, installed on the HDMS Absalon of the Royal Danish Navy, passed the Sea Acceptance Test (SAT) with flying colours. Overall conclusion: SMART-S Mk2 easily exceeded all requirements. In particular the requirement for low elevation tracking accuracy was typically exceeded by a factor 7. During the tests , SMART-S Mk2 was controlled through Absalon’s third-party supplied CFlex Command and Control system. The SAT was held from 21 August until 30 August and took place in the littoral waters of Kattegat and in the vicinity of Bornholm. During the tests only three Thales engineers were on board of HDMS Absalon. The SAT consisted of many separate tests with a great variety of targets:
– A Landing Craft Personnel and a Fast Patrol Boat were used for surface detection and track accuracy tests;
– A Lear jet made about ten sorties to test SMART-S Mk2’s air detection and track accuracy;
– Lynx helicopters from the Danish and British navies were used for accuracy tests, track initiation and maintenance tests and helicopter approach manoeuvres. On multiple occasions the helicopter even landed on the Absalon’s heli deck guided by SMART S Mk2;
– F16 jets of the Danish Air Force made two sorties of two jets each to test the track maintenance for manoeuvring high-velocity targets. They performed combat turns and multiple high-G weaving flight patterns. The F16s also simulated low-altitude (100 ft) high-velocity attacks in formations and flight patterns designed to mislead SMART-S Mk2.
– A Mitsubishi MU2 turboprop airplane was used for minimum range tests. For this purpose, the plane made several overhead passes.
06 Nov 07. AdaCore announced that Raytheon has delivered the Ship Self-Defense System (SSDS) Mk 2 using GNAT Pro for LynxOS within its multi-language software development environment. SSDS Mk 2 is a combat system that integrates and coordinates the sensors and weapons systems aboard a US Naval vessel to provide a coherent tactical picture for situational awareness, command and controls, and quick-reaction self-defence. It is a single-source baseline that supports multiple system configuration modifications (MODs) for large deck ship classes (aircraft carriers and amphibious ships). GNAT Pro was specifically used on the SSDS Mk 2 to support Ada application development on the Intel processors and the LynxOS operating system. “SSDS Mk 2 is a modular distributed program consisting of C, C++, and Ada software components,” said Mark A. Hodge, SSDS Mk 2 Technical Director for Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems. “LynxOS for x86 was selected because of its real-time determinism as we migrated from an older operating system towards a more mainstream OS. The AdaCore GNAT Pro compile system was selected both for its support for LynxOS and its association with GNU, which is being used for the C and C++ application components.” “AdaCore’s GNAT Pro tool set provided Raytheon with the seamless interoperability it required to support the inherently mixed-language development of SSDS Mk 2,” said Robert Dewar, President of AdaCore. “On large, mission-critical systems, Ada is often used in conjunction with other languages, and the Ada design specifically caters to such usage. AdaCore provides complete support for compilation with multi-language build and debug for all GNAT Pro environments.”
06 Nov 07. In a first-of-its-kind dual missile defense test, two Raytheon Company-built Standard Missile-3s, fired from a U.S. Navy ship, simultaneously intercepted and destroyed two short-range ballistic missile targets in space, Nov. 6. This was the first time a Navy ship demonstrated simultaneous engagements against ballistic missile targets outside the earth’s atmosphere. These were the 10th and 11th successful intercepts for the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense weapon system’s SM-3. The crew of the guided missile cruiser U