The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, MA received 2 contract modifications worth a combined $243 million to provide engineering support and repair services for the Trident II D5 guidance system.
The Trident II D-5, the sixth generation member of the US Navy’s fleet ballistic missile program, is a 3-stage, solid propellant ballistic missile with a range of more than 4,000 nautical miles.
Deployed aboard Ohio Class SSBNs and British Vanguard Class SSBNs, the Trident II uses the Mk6 LE inertial guidance system for navigation.
Just as the dog’s keen sense of smell makes it well suited to detect land mines, so the US Navy has found that the biological sonar of dolphins, called echolocation, makes them effective at locating and marking sea mines.
To take advantage of these skills, the Navy Marine Mammal Program studies, trains, and deploys dolphins, as well as sea lions, to carry out various underwater tasks for the Navy.
As part of the program, the Fleet’s Marine Mammal Systems (MMS) use dolphins and sea lions to find and mark the location of underwater objects…
Lockheed Martin Systems Integration in Owego, NY received a firm-fixed-price contract, worth up to $32.3 million, to retrofit 52 Marine Corps Light Armored Vehicle Command and Control (LAV-C2) vehicles with improved C2 capabilities.
The contract includes an initial order for the retrofit of 30 vehicles for $19.8 million, with the option of retrofitting 22 additional vehicles for $12.4 million.
This is a follow-on to a 2006 contract awarded to Lockheed Martin for LAV-C2 prototypes…
