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SOSTAR-X Programme Reaches an Important Milestone

Friedrichshafen, 14 August 2003

The European company Sostar GmbH, headquartered at Dornier GmbH in Friedrichshafen, has reached an important milestone with the Critical Design Review of the state-of-the-art Sostar-X radar demonstrator. Green light has been given by the five-nation Sostar Steering Committee, a body of the Ministries of Defence of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

“The Critical Design Review is an important milestone for further system development”, said Dr. Eugen Herpfer, general manager of Sostar GmbH. He further added, that along with its European partners, the Sostar project would combine the radar technology capabilities and place them on a higher technical level.

The airborne Stand-off Surveillance and Target Acquisition Radar (Sostar) is required for ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) and was originally conceived as a pure European response to Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS) needs. Sostar-X, a technology demonstrator specifically designed for this task, provides precise ground moving target information (GMTI), tracking and classification, as well as high-resolution synthetic aperture imagery to ground stations via data link. The radar in Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) antenna technology enables simultaneous operation in different operating modes and electronic beam steering. In Sostar-X, the radar sensor, processing capability, operation and screening of sensor products, as well as the data link will be installed on a Fokker 100 test platform.

The Sostar-X sensor system is a co-operative development project of five multinational European companies, i.e. Dutch Space (The Netherlands), EADS (Germany), Galileo Avionica (Italy), Indra (Spain), Thales Airborne Systems (France).

Friedrichshafen, August 14, 2003/02303

For further information:

Dornier GmbH
Michael Hartwig, Tel: + 49 7545-8-9124, Fax:-8-5888
E-Mail: michael.hartwig@dornier.eads.net