Long-Term Mine Reconnaissance System Explained

The AN/BLQ-11 autonomous unmanned undersea vehicle (formerly the Long-Term Mine Reconnaissance System (LMRS)) is a torpedo tube-launched and tube-recovered underwater search and survey unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV) capable of performing autonomous minefield reconnaissance as much as^[1] 200km (100miles) in advance of a host -, -, or -class submarine.

LMRS is equipped with both forward-looking sonar and side-scan synthetic aperture sonar.

Boeing concluded the detailed design phase of the development project on 31 August 1999.In January 2006, successfully demonstrated homing and docking of an LMRS UUV system during at-sea testing.^[2]

History

The USS Oklahoma City successfully launched the 20-foot-long vehicle for covert mine countermeasures in September 2005. The USS Scranton conducted 24 test runs in January 2006. In October 2007, USS Hartford conducted further tests.

The U.S. Navy's Mission Reconfigurable UUV System^[3] (MRUUVS) program,^[4] of which AN/BLQ-11 was a part, ended in December 2008 due to technical and engineering limitations.

Sources

• http://auvac.org/platforms/view/128

Notes and References

1. Web site: Advanced Pressure-Tolerant UUV Batteries for Fleet Use SBIR.gov . 2023-08-23 . www.sbir.gov.
2. Web site: https://web.archive.org/web/20061125045037/http://www.news.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=22618 . 25 November 2006 . USS Scranton Completes Successful UUV Test . news.navy.mil . 3 September 2006 . Piggott . Mark O..
3. Web site: Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center . DTIC.mil.
4. Book: Winchester . C. . Egan . C. . Drozd . D. . Zolla . A. . Westenberger . J. . Proceedings of the 2002 Workshop on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, 2002 . Performance, safety characterizations and system integration of a large lithium thionyl chloride battery for unmanned undersea vehicles . June 2002 . https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1177200 . 39–43 . 10.1109/AUV.2002.1177200. 0-7803-7572-6 . 108856840 .