UK Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

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Naval Today said:

The Royal Navy warship HMS Northumberland has completed final preparations and is now ready to deploy on a seven-month deployment policing crucial international maritime trade routes.

The Type 23 frigate leaves Plymouth on Monday morning (19th May) to relieve her sister ship HMS Somerset on a six-months patrol helping to keep the sea lanes open and clamping down on illegal activity in the region.

Her Commanding Officer, Commander Tristram Kirkwood, said: “My ship’s company is keen to get going on this demanding mission. It takes a tremendous amount of personal and professional commitment to regenerate a warship ready for operations and I am extremely proud of my ship’s company for the work they have done in getting us to this point. The ship’s company is rightly excited about the deployment and we are all committed to it being a success.”

“The ship’s company is rightly excited about the deployment and we are all committed to it being a success”, said Commander Tristram Kirkwood, Commanding Officer of HMS Northumberland.

HMS Northumberland has undergone an extensive period of regeneration to get her and her crew ready as a front-line fighting ship.

The ship conducted visits round the UK, including to her affiliated county of Northumberland and carried out trials and an intensive and challenging operational sea training programme under Flag Officer Sea Training staff to prepare for any event the patrol might throw at them.

HMS Northumberland is now poised for a deployment as part of the Royal Navy’s standing commitment in the Middle East, providing reassurance to the UK’s allies in the region, policing busy shipping lanes and carrying out maritime security and counter-piracy patrols

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asif iqbal said:

F35B could fly at the Christening ceremony unconfirmed reports

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RAF Typhoons have had their first encounter with Russian forces as part of their mission to protect Baltic airspace. The British fighters were already airborne on a training sortie when they were re-tasked to intercept an unidentified aircraft close to the Latvian border. At the same time Danish fighters were scrambled out Amari, Estonia, in support.

The unidentified aircraft was believed to be a Ka-27 helicopter that was operating over international waters but was not 'squawking' / transmitting an Air traffic control identification code nor talking to regional air traffic control; this type of helicopter being seen on the lead ship of the Corvette fleet by the Typhoons on arrival.

The 3 Squadron aircraft, normally based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire, paid a friendly visit to the Russian Stereguschiy class corvette which is the newest addition to the Russian Federation Naval fleet which is designed primarily to conduct coastal patrol operations.

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navyreco said:

Royal Air Force Typhoons Retasked to Investigate Unidentified Russian Navy Corvette and Helicopter

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F530, Steregushchiy Russian Corvette

F531, Soobrazitelny, Russian corvette
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Quantum positioning system steps in when GPS fails

14 May 2014 by Paul Marks

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issue 2969.
For similar stories, visit the Quantum World Topic Guide
Lost without your GPS? Accelerometers based on super-cooled atoms could keep track of your position with stunning precision

IN 2016 a British submarine will slip its moorings and set sail under the guidance of the quantum world. The navigation system it will be testing should record the vessel's position with 1000 times more accuracy than anything before.

If successful, the system, known as quantum positioning, could be miniaturised for use in aircraft, trains, cars and even cellphones. This would provide a backup navigation tool in cities' concrete canyons, or in autonomous vehicles, where a loss of GPS signal can be dangerous.

GPS doesn't work underwater, so submarines navigate using accelerometers to register every twist and turn of a vessel after it submerges and loses its last positioning fix. But this isn't very accurate.

"Today, if a submarine goes a day without a GPS fix we'll have a navigation drift of the order of a kilometre when it surfaces," says Neil Stansfield at the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at Porton Down. "A quantum accelerometer will reduce that to just 1 metre."

To create the supersensitive quantum accelerometers, Stansfield's team was inspired by the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Once chilled, the atoms achieve a quantum state that is easily perturbed by an outside force – and another laser beam can then be used to track them. This looks out for any changes caused by a perturbation, which are then used to calculate the size of the outside force.

The DSTL team wants this set-up to be usable in the real-world setting of a submarine, where the size of the force would correspond to the movements as the sub swings around in the sea.

Their prototype quantum accelerometer, which resembles a 1-metre-long shoe box, will be trialled on land in September 2015, the team will say at a conference at the UK National Physical Laboratory in Teddington this week. It will initially operate along just one axis, before two more sets of lasers and trapped atoms are added to accommodate motion in all three dimensions. Each will cool 1 million atoms of rubidium. "Once we have understood the first generations, we'll start to miniaturise it for other applications," says Stansfield.

It's not a done deal yet, though, because the accelerometer can't distinguish between tiny gravitational effects and accelerations caused by a vessel's movement. "If the submarine passes an underwater mountain whose gravity attracts it to the west, that feels exactly like an acceleration to the east," says Edward Hinds at the Centre for Cold Matter at Imperial College London, who is developing the accelerometer for the DSTL. "This means that very good gravity maps will be required to navigate correctly."

The DSTL isn't alone in pursuing quantum navigation: teams in the US, China and Australia are chasing the same prize.

"Super-accurate navigation makes sleeping easier for the captain of a submarine," says John Powis, head of the NATO Submarine Rescue Service in Faslane, UK, and a former navigator on Royal Navy submarines. It will also make it easier to go on patrol undetected, as submarines will no longer have to expose a mast to GPS, he says.

But Powis thinks this technology may have the greatest impact in future generations of weapons – once it has shrunk down in size. "The submarine does not need to know its position in metres and centimetres," he says. "But a projectile like a missile or shell might."

The DSTL team believes the technology has applications beyond warfare, though."Ten to 20 years ago this would have needed a huge cryogenic cooler, but laser-cooled atom clouds are changing all that," says team leader Stephen Till. He says future generations of the technology are likely to make their way into everything from cars to our smartphones. "We're convinced the size and power will come down for broad use."

This article will appear in print under the headline "Guided by atoms"

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Jura said:

On the Future of British Shipbuilding:

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