New Facility for Gyrocompass Support

Northrop Grumman Corporation officially opened its new U.K. technical support centre to provide service, repair and maintenance for the company's inertial navigation systems (INS) used in Royal Navy ships and submarines on Monday 1st June 2009.  

The new naval gyrocompass support centre, located at Northrop Grumman's Sperry Marine facility in New Malden, U.K., contains a full repair and calibration workshop to support NATO ship INS (SINS) installed on Royal Navy surface warships and attack submarines. Sperry Marine is under contract with the U.K. Ministry of Defence (MoD) to provide ongoing in-service support for these systems.

The event was attended by Northrop Grumman executives, as well as MoD officials and local political leaders. They received a tour of the facility as well as briefings on and demonstrations of its capabilities.

The new workshop will enable Northrop Grumman's U.K. employees to perform repairs and re-calibration services for the sophisticated inertial measurement units, which are at the heart of these military shipboard systems.

Northrop Grumman Sperry Marine's offices in New Malden are responsible for a number of major MoD programmes, including the integrated platform management systems being fitted on the Type 45 destroyers and the new Astute-class submarines, as well as the integrated navigation and bridge system being developed for the next generation of Royal Navy aircraft carriers. In addition, the New Malden facility is Sperry Marine's primary centre of excellence for navigation radar and electronic charting technology for commercial marine and international defence markets.

Based on Sperry Marine's proprietary ring-laser gyro (RLG) technology, the SINS devices provide extremely precise 3-D position and attitude reference data for the vessels' navigation and weapons systems. Sperry Marine is a world leader in RLG inertial navigation technology, having supplied the vast majority of SINS shipboard devices currently deployed with NATO and international naval forces around the world.