Aviation International News:
Thales has revealed details of the ballistic missile early warning radar (BMEWS) that it is developing under contract to the French Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Onera, the French government aerospace research agency. The work is a first for Europe and has potential application to the NATO active layered theatre ballistic missile defense (ALTBMD) system for that continent. The contract for an initial demonstration of capability was awarded in 2011, and Thales said that it will install a subscale system for tests at an MoD site this year.
This system has the French acronym DRTLP (Demonstration Radar Tres Longue Portee) and consists of only one of the eight columns of radiating elements that would make up an operational TLP system. Ronan Moulinet from Thales Air Systems SAS showed journalists one of five 3- by 4-meter sub-panels that make up a column, which is currently under test at the company’s Limours radar facility near Paris. He declined to specify against which ballistic missile launches the DRTLP could be tested, but it will face westward across the Atlantic from the site in southwest France, and have a range of 3,000 km.
Like the Raytheon BMEWS known as Pave Paws, the TLP is a low-frequency (UHF) radar. It can detect and track ballistic missiles from the boost to the exo-atmospheric phase and can be a “backbone of early warning capability,” according to Moulinet. He also noted that Pave Paws is a fixed-site system; the TLP’s modular design means that it can be dismantled and moved from site to site by container. He compared the TLP favorably with Raytheon’s TPY-2 radar, which is similarly designed to provide early warning of incoming ballistic missiles. However, that radar operates in X-band, has a narrower field of view, and has to be deployed closer to the predicted launch points of the missiles.
