Defense One:
A small Danish firm of just 100 people says it has a cheaper way for the U.S. military to track enemy missiles.
The company, Weibel, has a 40-year track record in U.S. military space efforts, mostly building test-range radars to measure the precision and velocity of bullets and missiles at places like Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground and New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range. Its products also include radars on the Paladin and M777 howitzers, and even sensors that tracked Space Shuttle launches. But Weibel’s latest project just might be its most innovative — even disruptive — yet.
Last month, on the sidelines of the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Ala., Weibel president Peder Pedersen explained the technology behind the Gap Filling Tracking Radar.
“Our niche is that we do not have a full phased array, but we have a limited phased array where we can steer the beam a little, but then we move the radar on a mount,” Pedersen said. “We’re the only ones that move it on a mount. You either have a surveillance radar that [spins] around all the time or you have a fixed, phased array.”
Pedersen says Weibel’s small, pedestal-mounted radars are less expensive than electronic scanned array radars because they don’t have as many elements. Once given a cue — the location of a missile — Weibel executives say its radar can track the rocket and differentiate it from other objects in space.
