"Nestled off a road at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., is a complex of modern office buildings that house some of the Army's most innovative programs. Dubbed the Army's C4ISR Campus, it has the feel of a Silicon Valley office park: horizontal fins direct sunlight inward, and giant lathe screens are meant to hold ivy to help keep the buildings cool in summer.
On the fifth floor of one building is a secret Army laboratory dubbed the Joint Testing and Integrating Facility. Cellphones and electronics have to be stored in lockers outside. It's a software engineering lab and the computer servers inside give off a roar.
It's here that the U.S. Army's latest ISR plane is being rigged up to do its job. In the back of the room, next to cabinets with combination locks, is a full-size mock-up of a plane fuselage — the fuselage of a King Air 350, which has become the standard for a lot of ISR platforms. The fuselage is the armature for what will become the Army's newest intelligence platform, the Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System, or EMARSS. The fuselage has been set up so that guts of the system can be integrated, engineered, tested and changed. It's inside that the sensor operators sit and will operate "the ball" as it's called, working the signals intelligence, thermal, electro-optical and other sensors.
In a sense, this is an extraordinary way to build an ISR system. Lt. Col. Dean Hoffman, the project manager for EMARSS, joked that "we kick the tires and make sure all the systems work. This way, we can check the sensors and the integration before we burn an ounce of JP-8." He says the method paid for itself in the first 24 hours. "Boeing brought the racks in. The racks didn't fit right. The engineer had measured them wrong." The problem could be fixed fast, before they learned about the problem on an actual aircraft.
The primary mission of the EMARSS is to replace the Army's aged fleet of RC-12 Guardrail signals intelligence planes, a system first deployed when Richard Nixon was president. The most recent upgrade was the RC-12X, which flies in Afghanistan, listening in on Taliban cellphones and radios. Boeing is the prime contractor, and the base plan is to install an electro-optical/infrared full-motion video sensor and a communications intelligence collection system…"
Full article here
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When we have the miniature for this? (smile).
Amicalement
Armand
