Civilian Radar Operators to Support U.S. Army in Afghanistan

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Radar experts at the Northrop Grumman Corp. Electronic Systems segment in Linthicum, Md., will continue to operate and support a system designed to detect and follow people traveling on foot, as well as moving land vehicles, under terms of a $65.3 million contract modification announced Friday.

Northrop Grumman will do the work on the U.S. Army’s Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (VADER) system. The Army has been operating three VADER man-hunting radar systems – two in Afghanistan and one in the U.S. VADER can be operated from manned fixed-wing aircraft such as the twin-engine Britten-Norman Islander, on which the company flight-tested VADER in 2008, as well as on the General Atomics MQ-1C Grey Eagle UAV.

According to Military & Aerospace VADER is designed to track vehicles and foot traffic over a wide area from UAVs and manned aircraft, and provide Army ground commanders with real-time ground moving target indicator (GMTI) data and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. The system operates in two modes: as a synthetic aperture radar for high-resolution still images, and as a real-time ground moving target indicator for detecting and tracking moving targets-particularly moving vehicles and humans on foot.

IHLS – Israel Homeland Security

The overall idea of the VADER system is to detect teams planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to destroy or damage U.S. military vehicles and personnel. VADER also has been demonstrated to track animals and boats. The VADER’s ground moving target indicators detect the Doppler shift that moving objects produce in radar return signals, Northrop Grumman officials say. Doppler shift is a change in the frequency of the radar return caused by the motion of the target. Because there is no shift caused by stationary objects, the shift reveals moving objects.

VADER transmits processed signals from the aircraft to ground stations, where operators can view still, high-contrast, black-and-white synthetic aperture radar images, or moving targets displayed as dots on a map.