Northrop Grumman has demonstrated open systems architecture for the Global Hawk UAV, successfully flying a NASA Global Hawk with the Open Mission Systems (OMS).
The flight, launched from NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, "confirmed the ability for ground operators to send OMS payload commands and receive OMS subsystem status responses over a Ku SATCOM Beyond-Line-Of-Sight (BLOS) communications link between the unmanned aircraft and an operations center," according to a Northrop Grumman announcement.
The flight also used the OMS Critical Abstraction Layer (CAL) adapted to an OMS Open Computing Environment (OCE) for the NASA Global Hawk.
"The demonstration illustrates Northrop Grumman's ability to rapidly deploy OMS on production Global Hawk platforms," the company said. "The architecture paves the way for integration of new payload options for Global Hawk to support mission flexibility and customer needs."
OMS will be demonstrated on an unspecified "manned airborne weapon" later this month.
