This robot could be your new shipmate
April 17th, 2012 | Industry Science and technology | Posted by Sam Fellman
The hull crawler, here on display at the annual Navy League symposium, can aid sailors by crawling into a ship's hard-to-reach spots. // Photo by Sam Fellman
Meet the hull crawler. Think Roomba robot, but for your ship’s hull — a remote rover that could keep sailors from having to squeeze into tight spaces or going over the side.
It’s a shoe-box-sized robot that clings to a ship’s hull with magnets, a device initially built to scout out the underwater mines divers could place along a ship’s hull. But now, designers are looking for additional uses that may assist sailors in more mundane tasks, like spotting corrosion along the hull or motoring into hard-to-reach places like tanks and voids.
The system — which is not in the fleet — can be controlled by a crew member or rove autonomously, sending back a video feed from the camera mounted on its arm. Two tanklike treads move it along surfaces about 10 feet per minute.
The robot — designed by QinetiQ and the Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, and displayed at the Navy League’s annual Sea-Air-Space symposium outside Washington, D.C. — could also have a laser affixed and be dispatched to clean tanks and voids, a tough job that normally falls to nimble, young sailors, according to its developers.
“It’s actually quite slick,” Curt Brockelman, a program manager with QinetiQ, said of the laser, which is being tested. “It’s like a butter knife.”
The possibilities don’t end there. Hull crawler could even be deputized as a boatswain’s mate — touching up gray paint on the hull here and there with a brush on its robotic arm.
A piggybacked peek into the future
December 16th, 2010 | Aviation Historical NASA Science and technology | Posted by Bill McMichael
A few lucky travelers passing through Lambert International Airport in St. Louis Dec. 13 may have caught a glimpse of aviation history in the making — and of military aviation’s future — when Boeing’s Phantom Ray unmanned airborne system hitched a ride on NASA’s Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.
NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a modified Boeing 747, taxis to a runway on Dec. 13 at Lambert International Airport in St. Louis with the Phantom Ray unmanned airborne system secured atop. // Ron Bookout, Boeing
The flight was a test to check the in-flight performance of the SCA while flying with the Phantom Ray and a special adapter before making the much longer trek to California for test flights at Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. And it marked the first time in 33 years the SCA had flown carrying an aircraft other than the Space Shuttle Orbiter. The fighter jet-sized Phantom Ray, designed and built by Boeing’s Phantom Works and funded entirely by Boeing, is a prototype that will be used as a test bed for advanced technologies ranging from intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to suppression of enemy air defenses.
Boeing's Phantom Ray unmanned airborne system sits atop a NASA Shuttle Carrier Aircraft prior to takeoff Dec. 13 at Lambert International Airport. // Ron Bookout, Boeing
The verdict: thumbs-up. The next day, the SCA and the Phantom Ray completed the 1,800-mile journey to Edwards. This pic was taken the day before:
NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, carrying Boeing's Phantom Ray unmanned airborne system, takes to the skies Dec. 13. // Ron Bookout, Boeing
A look inside the secret ship
October 6th, 2010 | Science and technology Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
Legendary sea-scribes Faram and Cavas were aboard Sea Fighter for part of its time underway this week. // John Williams / Navy
Who knows what mysteries lie inside the aluminum skin of the Navy’s one-of-a-kind, experimental catamaran, the Sea Fighter? Who can say what kind of advanced, high-speed equipment they’ve got on that thing, or what undocumented capabilities are built into the ship?
Soon, you will. Our senior colleagues Mark D. Faram and Christopher P. Cavas — what a team… those two are their own Murderer’s Row! — got to go aboard the Sea Fighter off Florida this week, and soon you’ll be able to see their stories and even video reports on Navy Times and Defense News.
The cyber-troops of tomorrow
October 4th, 2010 | Personnel Science and technology | Posted by Phil Ewing
A new cadre of Navy "cyber warrants" could be for computer-warfare what pilots such as Chief Warrant Officer 2 Fredrick Torres, seen here with his UH 60, are for Army aviation. // Sgt. Beth Gorenc / Army
Here’s a challenge for today’s high-tech, super-joint Navy: How do you attract a cadre of — let’s be honest here — nerdy, perhaps less-martial computer experts that will stick around to pay back the time and money required to train them in the arcane cyber-disciplines that none of us understand? A 1980s-style movie montage immediately springs to mind: Glasses ground under boot heels at Recruit Training Command; graphing calculators used as fodder for games of keep-away; shaved heads dunked into toilet bowls in special rigged-for-sea, high-reg swirlies…. and so on.
The top brass has evidently had these same visions, which is why 10th Fleet commander Vice Adm. Barry McCullough told House lawmakers not long ago that the Navy is developing new cyber-specific career fields, including what he called “cyber warrants” and “cyber engineers.” Not many details yet on what that actually means, but the idea seems to be that a cyber warrant, for example, could spend a career like many Army aviators, who get to fly their beloved helicopters safe from being promoted to a desk job, or staff assignment, or the other parts of a career that take you outside your area of specialization.
Moreover, these cyber-warrants might have duty that didn’t look much like ordinary Navy service: Hanging out up at Fort Meade, Md., or at other shore installations that serve as major network nodes, and potentially going to sea much less often than Joe or Jane Deckplate. In fact, could this present a way for the Navy to entice people already in the force today to lat-move into the cyber world? That might be a quick way to solve part of the cadre-building problem… Would you do it?
LCS joins the sonar club
September 28th, 2010 | Science and technology Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
The littoral combat ship Independence, or its descendants, might stream variable-depth sonars from their stern doors if the Navy decides to field them on the LCS of tomorrow. // MC2 Justan Williams / Navy
As you no doubt remember from your March 15 edition of Navy Times, the Navy has been on the hunt for a variable depth sonar to field aboard the littoral combat ship. As you’re about to learn when you click here, now it has found one. Just one, for now, according to Defense News; Euro-defense giant Thales says it has sold a single Captas 4 sonar to the U.S. Navy for testing aboard LCS, as part of the ongoing, Cirque du Soleil -style reimagining of how the ships will work.
At first, LCS wasn’t supposed to have an onboard sonar, or many other sensors of its own — the idea was that unmanned boats, submarines and aircraft would carry them away from the ship to do their work. But a whole bunch of stuff happened and, bottom line, the Navy has had to effectively go back to the drawing board on a lot of this. So one new idea was for LCS to use a sonar of its own in concert with its unmanned sensors, and even to keep a towed array streamed out as it sprinted ahead of a carrier strike group, slowing occasionally to listen for undersea bad guys. Then again, that concept may have changed within the Navy, especially after Adm. John Harvey told Congress he doesn’t want LCS to run with strike groups.
Then again… again… a Thales executive told Defense News it might sell as many as 25 of these sonars to the U.S. Navy, presumably all for use with LCS, so somebody in the Navy still may like the sprint-and-drift ASW scheme. Or, at least, somebody in the Navy was thinking of the very, very busy LCS crews by ordering a sonar that’s supposed to be able to launch and recover itself automatically.
Behind the cyber veil
August 17th, 2010 | Science and technology Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
Cyber sailors at Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command in Virginia Beach, Va., do their secret squirrel stuff. // MC2 Joshua Wahl / Navy
Even though many details about nuclear weapons are secret, you don’t need a physics degree to understand them: Somewhere under water, somebody aboard the ballistic missile submarine Maryland pulls a trigger, a big thing shoots out and flies someplace, and whatever that place was, it ain’t no more.
“Cyber warfare” isn’t like that: It’s both secret and complicated. No one but its practitioners really knows anything about it, and of course, they’re not talking to the likes of you. But even though those very qualities are what make the military and national security worlds love their incipient cyber roles, they could be putting the U.S. in danger, writes Naval Institute blogger YN2 H. Lucien Gauthier III:
If a nation state purposefully destroyed the Hoover Dam, it would be unequivocal that we would have to respond in kind. However, in a cyber-attack, if the [New York Stock Exchange] was taken offline we would 1) struggle to say who was guilty of the attack and 2) struggle to prove the efficacy of a kinetic/real world response to the attack — does utter economic devastation demand a nuclear response? Is a way of life shattered the same no matter if the cause is nuclear or electronic? … To both effectively protect our infrastructure and project force in this domain we have to have a clear ethical and philosophical foundation from which to act … We are held to the orders of the National Command Authority and the laws of the United States, [so] it is from there we must understand how to proceed. Yet, all I hear is static on the line from the NCA and our jurisprudence.
Hard to get answers to questions when nobody’s allowed to talk about the subject at hand. Moreover, does it seem unsettling that both the Navy and Air Force have approved designs for their relevant cyber-warfare pins, but there’s still “static” about the major philosophical questions of cyber-combat? If, in fact, you find that unsettling, do not read this story about the Pentagon’s to-do list in getting this whole cyber-shootin’ match started.
What WikiLeaks has on the Navy
August 6th, 2010 | Science and technology | Posted by Phil Ewing
The locations of CIWS ammunition stockpiles (hint: "naval weapons stations") are one of the Navy secrets now available on WikiLeaks. // MC2 Greg Johnson / Navy
After a week’s worth of harrumphing and condemnation, the Pentagon on Thursday just came right out and said it: The online information-mischief site WikiLeaks must “return” the “stolen” documents it posted online and shared with several major newspapers, because, gol-dang it, that’s the “right thing to do.” This was after top officials initially said, “nah, nothin’ to see here,” and many other Washington commentators essentially agreed, saying, “there is nothing in this material we didn’t already know.”
The Navy brass must be relieved that all this mishegoss has focused on the ground forces in Afghanistan, and that whatever dark, explosive secrets are buried in the Navy’s vaults have not yet appeared online. When you search WikiLeaks for “Navy,” two things it coughs up are a 2009 PowerPoint brief on the Ohio-class SSGN conversion, and a list of the installations that store depleted uranium ammunition for the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System. Wait, there are weapons at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach?
Still, this whole WikiLeaks situation raises so many questions for the entire Defense Department: What happened to all our cyber-warriors? Aren’t we supposed to have “Transformers”-style rooms full of super-hackers who can use their network powers to just vacuum up the offending documents from WikiLeaks’ servers, so defense spokesmen don’t have to ask politely? WikiLeaks is reportedly preparing an even bigger data dump of more supposedly sensitive material, but the file is said to be so well encrypted that it’s basically impenetrable. What happened to “information dominance?”
The Navy suffers its latest cyber attack
July 19th, 2010 | Personnel Science and technology | Posted by Phil Ewing
"Vampire, vampire, vampire! Attack inbound! A magazine says NPC's website uses an outmoded, early 2000s-era user interface! Brace for imact!" // Navy
The threat-warning receivers at 10th Fleet have got to be wailing this morning after the Navy endured its latest computer-network attack: Information Week has included Navy Personnel Command’s website on a list of 12 government pages that it calls “shocking examples of bad user experience.”
(So, wait, does that also mean that Naval Administration Messages — DESIGNED TO ACCOMMODATE TELETYPE MACHINES THAT COULD NOT PRODUCE BOTH UPPER AND LOWER-CASE CHARACTERS — are no longer a state-of-the-art communications medium?)
The net’s Special Duty Crypto Captain made his displeasure known:
As a member of the information dominance corps, I find this both appalling and somewhat embarrassing. In an organization that says “People are our number 1 priority” and “we are the most dominant information force in the U.S. military,” this site does not reflect either of those statements. We owe our sailors more. I hope this is not a contractor-maintained website.
It’s the most serious strike against a Navy computer system since those tense few hours during which Navy-Marine Corps Intranet users couldn’t bring up Fox News, which led Fox News to ask whether the Navy’s computer network had been compromised by hackers. What do you think? Is NPC’s site simple but usable? Or is it just a step above the pony express?
The Zumwalt whirlpool keeps spinning
June 7th, 2010 | Science and technology Ships | Posted by Phil Ewing
A new radar may enable future Zumwalt-class destroyers to fire SM-2 missiles, like this one aboard the cruiser Lake Erie. Then again, who really knows? // MDA
Can anyone say anything for certain about the Navy’s next-generation destroyer known as DDG 1000? We’ve observed before that with this ship, up is down and black is white — the gymnastics of fact that have followed it for years make you want to lie down with a cold compress over your eyes.
In 2008, the three-star admiral who was then the Navy’s top requirements official told Congress the Navy had “excess capacity” to support Marines ashore, so there wasn’t as big a need for DDG 1000 and its two powerful 155mm guns. He told Congress the ship wouldn’t be able to handle the Standard family of surface-to-air missiles, even though they’re carried by every other cruiser and destroyer. He said Zumwalt couldn’t do ballistic missile defense. He said there was a scary new “classified threat” — probably China’s mega-death-ray-double-killtastic-super missile — against which Zumwalt was impotent.
Was any of that true? Did the Navy change Zumwalt’s specifications to make it true? Is it still true? At the time, the Navy wanted to scale back DDG 1000 from seven ships to two or three — Congress and the Defense Department ultimately agreed — and now, the Navy wants to save it. As our senior colleague Christopher P. Cavas reports, DoD last week certified that it needs Zumwalts despite the increase in cost caused by the cut to the ships, but it’s deleting one of their planned radars. As you check out his story about the latest revolutions in this vortex, don’t be afraid of taking deep breaths and frequent breaks.
AH-1W Super Cobra links
June 2nd, 2010 | Aviation Carriers Naval Academy Pirates Science and technology | Posted by Phil Ewing
Much as Marine Cobra gunship helicopters -- like this one, from HMM 166 -- deliver support exactly where the grunts need it, so too do today's links bring the latest updates right to you. // MC1 Richard Doolin / Navy
Whip-whip whip-whip whip-whip whip-whip whip-whip whip-whip — twin-rotor spinnin’, Hellfire missile slingin’, big-deck gator launchin’ links, coming in low out of the haze, straight at you, with no question about who they are or what they’re capable of:
- The Norfolk-based cruiser San Jacinto is the latest warship on a pirate tear.
- There’s a petition in the works these days for the Navy to name its next ship after the late Medal of Honor recipient Lt. John Finn — we hasten to point out that DDG 1002 is as yet unnamed…
- Sailors on boarding teams at sea may be able to zip up the sides of high-freeboard vessels like Batman with the Office of Naval Researcher’s new rope ascender.
- Apparently we’re all taking completely in the open these days about China’s super death-ray re-targetable anti-ship ballistic missile — no more spooky “classified threat” phrases. As such, other navies with carrier-fielding aspirations are realizing they too might have some challenges putting their ships to sea in a hostile environment.
- The latest chapter in the endless saga called “What Will Happen To the Ex-Carrier John F. Kennedy” seems to be in the works: One Maine activist wants to get on board with plans to bring JFK down east, only he says engineers should install wind turbines on the flight deck and let it earn its keep.
- Pacific Fleet, take note: It’s midshipman season.