B-2 Stealth Bomber Upgrades on Target
by John Little on 15/07/2008
The bomber is getting a lot of processing and bandwidth upgrades:
Following the US Air Force’s approval of a preliminary design review in early June, Northrop has been cleared to finalise the design by October and to deliver the computer upgrade for flight tests in the fourth quarter of 2009, says Ron Naylor, its B-2 programme manager. The company is upgrading the B-2′s 256Kb-class processor chip with a Pentium-class Lockheed Martin integrated processing unit, with the improved FMS to feature 1Gb/s computational speed.
Once installed, the replacement processor and a new disc drive with fibre channel interfaces will enable a series of future and ongoing upgrades for the bomber’s weapon and sensor systems. Northrop is upgrading its radar antenna, for example, to an active electronically scanned array. The radar processor, however, is being left alone until the FMS can handle the data throughput required to process synthetic aperture radar maps.
Translation: It will be able to kill more stuff faster.
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