Last Updated: 03/24/2011*

The completion of the upgrade of the Early Warning Radar (EWR) at Thule, Greenland, marks the third successful upgrade Raytheon has completed under the Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR) program. The previous two upgrades occurred on radars located at Beale Air Force Base, Beale, Calif., and Royal Air Force Fylingdales, United Kingdom.

Work on the Thule upgrade began in 2006, and the construction phase of the program was completed in 2008. During the next two years, Raytheon installed hardware and software to the system and conducted testing to evaluate the readiness of the radar to perform its expanded mission for missile defense. Raytheon leveraged the knowledge and experience from the previous upgrades and drew upon the more than 70-year heritage of building large, highly reliable, phased-array radars to complete the upgrade on time and under budget.

The UEWR Mission

The UEWR covers three primary missions for multiple customers:

Space object surveillance.
Missile early warning.
Missile defense.

The radar provides the United States Strategic Command and Air Force Space Command Space Surveillance Network with satellite surveillance and radar space object identification. These radars detect more than half the objects in the entire space catalog within a 24-hour period.

For the missile early warning mission, the UEWR provides early detection and precise tracking of incoming ballistic missiles, as well as quick, accurate determination of threat versus non-threat objects. Finally, the UEWR is a key sensor for the Missile Defense Agency’s Ballistic Missile Defense System, supporting the intercept of threatening ballistic missiles above the atmosphere and well away from their intended targets while concurrently performing the early warning mission.

Future of the Program

Two EWRs remain to be upgraded to this new configuration: the radar at Clear Air Force Base, Clear, Alaska, and Cape Cod Air Force Station, Cape Cod, Mass. The competition for the upgrade at Clear will occur later in 2011, and it is expected that the Cod radar will be upgraded in the near future. However, an exact date for the upgrade has not been released.

Raytheon has successfully upgraded three radars under this UEWR configuration and will draw on the experience and lessons learned from those upgrades and its 70-year heritage in radar development for all future upgrades, including the Clear radar later this year.