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GEOINT 2023 — The Space Force’s flagship missile warning program took a step forward this month, with Northrop Grumman receiving a passing grade in its critical design review for the two polar satellites it is contributing to the planned Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) constellation.
Alex Fax, the company’s vice president for the program, told Breaking Defense on Tuesday that the successful review, held May 2-4, “helps us stay on track for an accelerated program timeline to get to a 2028 launch. CDR is an important milestone in the life of the program.”
In a press release today, the company explained that the design review establishes the “technical approach for the full integration of the Eagle-3 spacecraft with the infrared sensor, auxiliary and high-bandwidth communication payloads” for the satellites.
The Space Force in May 2020 awarded Northrop Grumman a $2.37 billion contract for the development of the two satellites, which will travel in a highly elliptical orbit crossing over the Earth’s poles.
“With the two of them you get continuous coverage of the northern hemisphere as well as direct comms back to continental US due to the orbit geometry, which is a nice feature for the program. The mission here is strategic missile warning, to include both ballistic and hypersonic missiles,” Fax said.
The two Northrop Grumman birds will join three more satellites, built by Lockheed Martin, that will be stationed in geosynchronous orbit to make up the whole Next-Gen OPIR constellation. The five satellites will replace the current missile warning constellation, the Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS), the last of which was launched last year. The Space Force has asked for $2.6 billion in its fiscal 2024 budget for the Next-Gen OPIR program.
The infrared payload on the polar satellites, developed by Northrop Grumman and Ball Aerospace, is a “scanning, multi-band system,” explained Aaron Dann, Northrop Grumman Space Systems vice president for strategic force programs for payload and ground systems division. “In those bands, we have capability against a range of threats,” he added.
It also is the same payload that will go on one of the Lockheed Martin satellites, something that “brings a lot of cost savings,” Fax said.
Randy Weidenheimer, director of OPIR programs at Northrop Grumman, elaborated that the new infrared sensors have “greater sensitivity, as well as greater coverage than the current generation sensors, so there’s a high expectation for their performance.”
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