Northrop Grumman has been awarded a contract from the US Space Force for a second Deep-Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) site, the company announced on 26 August 2024.
According to the US Department of Defense’s contracts website, the value of the DARC Site 2 contract is USD 200.25 million (EUR 179 million), with work to be completed by 4 February 2030.
The second site, to be located in the United Kingdom, continues DARC’s path to becoming one of the world’s most advanced radars for tracking objects in deep space.
The initial DARC contract, worth USD 341 million (EUR 305 million) and awarded in February 2022, covered the design, development and delivery of a Site 1 system located in the Indo-Pacific region, which is expected to be completed in 2025.
A third DARC site will also be established in Australia.
The DARC network is designed to monitor objects in geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above the equator 24/7 in all weather conditions, providing full global coverage to protect critical US and allied satellites. It will be operated in collaboration with Australia and the United Kingdom as the US partners in the AUKUS security pact, expanding beyond what those individual nations could achieve alone.
While traditional ground-based optical space domain awareness (SDA) systems only operate at night and are affected by weather conditions, the DARC programme will boost the resilience of the space domain architecture through its ability to monitor 24/7 in all weather conditions, making operational surprise exceedingly difficult for adversaries.
“The DARC Site 2 award expands Northrop Grumman’s support for the US Space Force’s space domain awareness capabilities in an increasingly contested domain,” Pablo Pezzimenti, vice president of integrated national systems at Northrop Grumman, was quoted as saying in a company press release. “This site brings us closer to achieving global coverage of deep space, which is a critical mission for future security of the US and its allies.”
