CHELMSFORD, Mass. November 15, 2011 Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRCY, www.mc.com), a trusted provider of commercially developed application-ready ISR subsystems for defense prime contractors, announced that its Mercury Federal Systems subsidiary is part of the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC)-led team that was named the 2011 C4ISR Journal Big 25 Awards Top Sensor award winner. The award was presented at the 11th Annual C4ISR Journal Conference in Washington D.C.
“Mercury is honored to be part of this award-winning team and proud to provide the onboard real-time processing technology that enables our forces to secure actionable intelligence and gain persistent situational awareness and of ground activities in near-real time,” said Dr. Paul Monticciolo, general manager, Mercury Federal Systems. “Mercury’s flexible, SWaP-optimized processing architecture delivers unmatched performance through new on-board capabilities for Sierra Nevada’s system solution, enabling the most powerful data processing and exploitation to occur closer to the sensor while overcoming air-to-ground communications bottlenecks.”
Each year the editorial staff of C4ISR Journal selects the Big 25 programs and innovations within the ISR community and, with selected outside defense intelligence community experts, gathers to choose the Top 5 award winners. At the annual Conference and Awards Ceremony, the C4ISR community gathers together to publicly honor the Big 25 and announce the Top 5 winners which are selected from five categories: Platforms; Sensors; Networks; Agencies and Organizations; and Innovations.
The United States Air Force (USAF)’s Gorgon Stare (GS) Wide-Area Persistent Surveillance System, developed by the SNC-led, best-of-breed industry team under the USAF/Big Safari rapid acquisition program, has been flying operational missions since April, 2011. Hosted on a USAF/General Atomics long-dwell MQ-9 Reaper unmanned air vehicle, each GS orbit provides uninterrupted, 24/7 visible and IR coverage of city-sized areas, providing real-time motion video directly to theater and tactical forces engaged in operations. In addition to its primary tactical consumers, this game-changing system also provides these products in near real-time to the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) enterprise for unprecedentedly rapid exploitation and time-sensitive forensic analysis support. The entire mission data set, which is recorded onboard the aircraft in machine-lossless format, is provided post-mission for live, long-term archiving and discovery, and additional current exploitation.
In addition to Mercury Federal Systems, SNC’s Increment 1 partners included ITT Geospatial Systems, MIT/LL, L3, Gitchner, and AdamWorks. SNC is currently under USAF contract to develop the next generation of Gorgon Stare systems. In addition to its Increment 1 partners, the SNC-led Increment 2 team adds BAE Systems as the next-generation visible sensor provider. The SNC-led Gorgon Stare team, which included Mercury, also won this award in 2009 for developing a system of five electro-optical still cameras and four infrared cameras to be installed on Reaper UAVs for day and night wide-area surveillance.
Rugged, Open Processing Technology
Mercury’s on-board, real-time sensor signal processing subsystem utilizes open, standards-based 6U OpenVPX™ architecture and includes the following commercial computing hardware and software building blocks: OpenVPX GPU processing module, Switch module, Intel® Core i7™-based Server module, and Imaging Toolkit. Together, these modules are used to execute the advanced real-time algorithms to generate the EO and IR imagery products. Mercury’s ruggedized solid state disk drive–based Digital Storage Unit stores mission data for both immediate exploitation and longer term forensic analysis.
For more information, visit www.mc.com, or contact Mercury at (866) 627-6951 or [email protected].
Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. – Where Challenges Drive Innovation®
Mercury Computer Systems (www.mc.com, NASDAQ: MRCY) is a best of breed provider of open, commercially developed, application-ready, multi-INT subsystems for defense prime contractors. With more than 30 years of experience in embedded computing, superior domain expertise in radar, EW, EO/IR, C4I, and sonar applications, and more than 300 successful program deployments including Aegis, Global Hawk, and Predator, Mercury’s Services and Systems Integration team leads the industry in partnering with customers to design and integrate system-level solutions that minimize program risk, maximize application portability, and accelerate customers’ time to market.
Mercury is based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and serves customers worldwide through a broad network of direct sales offices, subsidiaries, and distributors.