The US Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Atlantic officially opened a new Maritime Positioning, Navigation and Timing (M-PNT) facility at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek, Virginia.
The lab will support the US Navy by providing research, development, test, evaluation, integration and certification works for both surface and submarine PNT systems. This includes supporting new technologies being developed and introduced into the fleet for operating in a global positioning system (GPS) or sensor in denied environment. These technologies include enhancements to inertial navigation systems and alternative positioning system technologies to GPS.
The laboratory will also facilitate research, development, test and evaluation efforts for other navy and Department of Defense customers, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in support of maritime geospatial intelligence technical standards, and exploitation by the fleet.
Construction on the approximately $3 million laboratory began in May 2018 and is still in progress. Although the structure is complete, some minor work remains before the lab attains a fully functional status.
The facility will also support the navigation suite certification process being developed for the fleet, which tests the design, integration and interoperability of the entire PNT system of systems architecture in both surface ships and submarines. Initially, the lab will support guided missile destroyer-class and Virginia-class architectures, then grow to be reconfigurable to support all fleet PNT system of systems architectures.
The airborne three-domain, the two ground-based and the ¼ ATR OpenVPX-based cross-domain systems were engineered to provide real-time security across multi-domain operations.
DARPA’s Mission-Integrated Network Control (MINC) programme was set up to develop an autonomous tactical network and enable critical data flow in contested environments.
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Defence-secure mixed reality headsets can save hours, or even weeks, of travel time to fix defunct equipment or get subject experts effectively “on-site” where they are needed.
The Joint Counter Radio-Controlled Improvised Explosive Device Electronic Warfare (JCREW) counter-improvised explosive device (C-IED) and Drone Restricted Access Using Known Electromagnetic Warfare (DRAKE) counter-UAS (CUAS) systems are mounted and dismounted RF jammers.
Adarga’s Vantage information analysis tool is in service with the UK MoD and individual UK forces. It builds on the company’s Knowledge Platform which processes, organises and analyses open source material, as well as information held by the user’s military, security and intelligence services.
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