GPS World, February 2016

DEFENSEUPDATE DARPA Awards Unmanned Demonstration Contract The Tern system would deploy and recover UAVs from small deck naval ships Illustration Northrop Grumman T he U S Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA and the Office of Naval Research have awarded Northrop Grumman the third phase of the Tern unmanned systems program Phase three plans include final design fabrication and a full scale at sea demonstration of the system Tern seeks to develop an autonomous unmanned long range global and persistent intelligence surveillance reconnaissance ISR and strike system intended to safely and dependably deploy and recover from small deck naval vessels with minimal ship modifications Designed to operate in harsh maritime environments Tern aims to enable greater mission capability and flexibility for surface combat vessels without the need for establishing fixed land bases or requiring scarce aircraft carrier resources According to DARPA Tern would use smaller ships as mobile launch and recovery sites for medium altitude long endurance MALE unmanned aircraft UAVs Named after the family of seabirds known for flight endurance many species migrate thousands of miles each year Tern aims to make it much easier quicker and less expensive for the Department of Defense to deploy persistent airborne ISR and strike capabilities almost anywhere in the world Ideally Tern would enable on demand ship based unmanned aircraft systems UAS operations without extensive time consuming and irreversible ship modifications It would provide small ships with a mission truck that could transport ISR and strike payloads to very long distances from the host vessel The solution would support fieldinterchangeable mission packages for both overland and maritime missions It would operate from multiple ship types and in elevated sea states Northrop Grummans Tern solution seeks to provide an innovative system that integrates mature and advanced technologies including a distinctive propulsion solution 60 GPS WORLD WWW GPSWORLD COM FEBRUARY 2016 NEWTECH MICROSEMI OFFERS SECURITY HARDENED TIMING PLATFORM Microsemi Corporation is offering a network time protocol NTP server for defense and security The new SyncServer S650 provides a highly secure accurate and flexible timing and frequency platform for synchronizing network elements and mission critical electronics systems in government instrumentation applications such as satellite communications and defense operational infrastructure It offers time synchronization with hardware based time stamp support that significantly reduces jitter and latency in time served without losing accuracy It is a highly versatile timing and frequency system with the companys FlexPort technology for multiport user definable output signal configuration Along with the SyncServer S600 aimed at IT networks the new timing platform makes significant advances in the security hardening of timing ports as well as adaptability to various network topologies and flexibility of timing output configuration Other benefits include clock accuracy typically better than 10 nanoseconds to universal time and environmental design robustness Webinar Microsemi will host a free webinar on network timing protocols and other timing security issues on March 31 Register at gpsworld com webinars Inside the SyncServer S650