Northrop Concludes Underwater Demo for AQS-24 Mine Detecting Sonar

Northrop Grumman conducted a system test for a minehunting sonar designed to trace and classify bottom and moored mines underwater.

The M/V Richard Becker held and submerged the AQS-24 sonar at a depth of over 400 feet at the coast of Fort Lauderdale in Florida, the company said Monday.

AQS-24 operated at various depths and validated bottom objects during the demonstration.

Northrop noted it incorporated machine learning capability into the sonar’s image exploitation tool to enable automatic target recognition. The U.S. Navy is slated to update its AQS-24 systems with the feature following the system test.

“This latest internal research and development effort underscores our commitment to provide the most innovative, affordable and operationally-proven capabilities to meet the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship Mine Countermeasures Mission package requirements and future expeditionary MCM needs,” said Alan Lytle, vice president of undersea systems at Northrop.