Mission Payloads Tested on MQ-25 Surrogate UAS

By Mike Ball / 04 Jul 2018
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GA-ASI MQ-25 unmanned tanker aircraft

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA‑ASI) has announced that it has successfully flown its MQ-25A surrogate unmanned aerial system (UAS) – a Predator C Avenger – outfitted with a representative set of mission payloads, including Electro-optical/Infrared (EO/IR), Electronic Support Measures (ESM), Automatic Identification System (AIS), and Mission Processing. MQ-25 is the U.S. Navy’s proposed unmanned aerial refueling aircraft program.

“Our ability to be agile has always been an important business driver for GA-ASI,” said Linden Blue, CEO, GA-ASI. “This representative mission system design for the MQ-25 leverages our strength and experience in developing open-architecture systems, which offer a flexible growth path towards future payloads.”

The GA-ASI team built upon its analysis performed under the Navy’s Concept Refinement contract to develop a scalable mission architecture that supports Open Mission System (OMS) standards and the Navy Inter-operability Profile (NIOP) datalink.

During the flight, the MQ-25A surrogate’s payloads were remotely commanded by GA-ASI’s extensible payload command and control (C2) system. The team will leverage this software to enhance the Navy’s Unmanned Carrier Aviation Mission Control System (UMCS). Between flights, GA-ASI quickly re-configured the UAS with different payloads to demonstrate the system’s modular design and the benefits of an open architecture solution.

Posted by Mike Ball Mike Ball is our resident technical editor here at Unmanned Systems Technology. Combining his passion for teaching, advanced engineering and all things unmanned, Mike keeps a watchful eye over everything related to the unmanned technical sector. With over 10 years’ experience in the unmanned field and a degree in engineering, Mike’s been heading up our technical team here for the last 8 years. Connect & Contact