Northrop Grumman Corporation has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Air Force to design a signals intelligence sensor for high-altitude intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms.
The company will employ its space awareness and global exploitation technology capabilities to deliver a prototype sensor with airborne and ground components for the Air Force’s Global High-altitude Open-system Sensor Technology (GHOST) program, Northrop Grumman said Tuesday.
Ben Davies, Northrop Grumman’s vice president and general manager of networked information solutions said, “leveraging our SAGE technology and 45 years of SIGINT mission expertise, our platform-agnostic GHOST sensor is a next-generation intelligence data collection and exploitation system.”
Northrop Grumman’s GHOST sensor prototype will feature an open standards-based hardware and software architecture that will be scalable and configurable for use on multiple types of manned and unmanned Air Force aircraft.
The GHOST sensor’s agile architecture will support ISR missions while enabling rapid system enhancement, testing and integration in anticipation of future advancements and battlespace changes.
This contract award continues the company’s contracted sensor work with the U.S. Air Force. Recently, Northrop Grumman served as the primary research team on a DARPA active electronically scanned array sensor system and facilitated the transition of the system to the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) base in Dayton, Ohio.