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Kearfott is a defense equipment manufacturer founded in 1918 in New Jersey, United States. It is based in Woodland Park. [1] Today the electronics division is part of BAE Systems, while the remaining Kearfott Guidance & Navigation division is a subsidiary of the Astronautics Corporation of America. It also has locations in Black Mountain, North Carolina and Matamoras, Mexico.
Kearfott Corporation was founded in 1918 by William Dunham Kearfott. [2] [ clarification needed ] It became the Kearfott Division of the General Precision Equipment Corporation in 1955 and then, in 1968, the Kearfott Division of Singer Business Corporation.
In 1987 Singer split Kearfott; the Kearfott Guidance & Navigation division was sold to the Astronautics Corporation of America in 1988, and the Electronic Systems Division was purchased by Plessey. In 1990 GEC-Marconi bought Plessey and renamed the unit in Wayne, New Jersey GEC-Marconi Electronic Systems.
Kearfott Guidance & Navigation Corporation officially changed its name to Kearfott Corporation effective June 1, 2008, reflecting the fact that the scope of the company's business was not limited to guidance and navigation products. [3]
Among the many vehicles and devices that contain a Kearfott built Inertial Navigation Unit (INU), is the Northrop-built Global Hawk. The KN-4072 and the KN-4074 are the preferred MRLG (Monolithic Ring Laser Gyro) units for Northrop's Global Hawk. The KN-4072a and the KN-4074 are based upon the KN-4071 design series, with a few key differences, most noticeably their enclosures and interfaces.
Kearfott built the inertial navigation system for the Pershing II missile.
Kearfott integrating gyroscopes (P/N C702519018-4) were used in the rate gyros for the Apollo Telescope Mount / Orbital Workshop (aka Skylab).
Singer Corporation is an American manufacturer of consumer sewing machines, first established as I. M. Singer & Co. in 1851 by Isaac M. Singer with New York lawyer Edward C. Clark. Best known for its sewing machines, it was renamed Singer Manufacturing Company in 1865, then the Singer Company in 1963. It is based in La Vergne, Tennessee, near Nashville. Its first large factory for mass production was built in 1863 in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Marconi Electronic Systems (MES), or GEC-Marconi as it was until 1998, was the defence arm of General Electric Company (GEC). It was demerged from GEC and bought by British Aerospace (BAe) on 30 November 1999 to form BAE Systems. GEC then renamed itself Marconi plc.
The General Electric Company, or GEC, was a major British industrial conglomerate involved in consumer and defence electronics, communications, and engineering. The company was founded in 1886, was Britain's largest private employer with over 250,000 employees in the 1980s, and at its peak in the 1990s, made profits of over £1 billion a year.
The Plessey Company plc was a British electronics, defence and telecommunications company. It originated in 1917, growing and diversifying into electronics. It expanded after World War II by acquisition of companies and formed overseas companies.
Litton Industries was a large defense contractor in the United States named after inventor Charles Litton Sr.
Ferranti or Ferranti International plc was a UK electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century from 1885 until it went bankrupt in 1993. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
The Marconi Company was a British telecommunications and engineering company that did business under that name from 1963 to 1987. Its roots were in the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company founded by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi in 1897, which underwent several changes in name after mergers and acquisitions. The company was a pioneer of wireless long distance communication and mass media broadcasting, eventually becoming one of the UK's most successful manufacturing companies. In 1999, its defence equipment manufacturing division, Marconi Electronic Systems, merged with British Aerospace (BAe) to form BAE Systems. In 2006, financial difficulties led to the collapse of the remaining company, with the bulk of the business acquired by the Swedish telecommunications company, Ericsson.
Siemens Plessey was the name given to the Plessey assets acquired by Siemens in 1989. Today most of these units are part of BAE Systems while some units are now part of EADS.
Marconi Communications, the former telecommunications arm of Britain's General Electric Company plc (GEC), was founded in August 1998 through the amalgamation of GEC Plessey Telecommunications (GPT) with other GEC subsidiaries: Marconi SpA, GEC Hong Kong, and ATC South Africa.
GEC Plessey Telecommunications (GPT) was a British manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, notably the System X telephone exchange. The company was founded in 1988 as a joint venture between GEC and the British electronics, defence and telecommunications company Plessey. The next year, after a joint holding company of GEC and the German conglomerate Siemens AG acquired Plessey, GPT was converted into a 60/40 GEC/Siemens joint venture. The GPT name ceased to be used in the mid-1990s, and in 1998 the company was amalgamated into Siemens Communications.
Thales Underwater Systems or TUS is a subsidiary of the French defense electronics specialist Thales Group. It was created in 2001 and belongs to its naval division. It specializes in the development and manufacturing of sonar systems for submarines, surface warships and aircraft, as well as communications masts and systems for submarines. Its headquarters are located in Sophia Antipolis, France.
Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems (NGES) was a sector of Northrop Grumman from 1996 to 2015 until a reorganization on January 1, 2016 merged other Northrop Grumman businesses into NGES to form a new sector called Mission Systems. NGES had originally been created by Northrop Grumman's acquisition of Westinghouse Electronic Systems Group in 1996. The Electronic Systems sector was a leading designer, developer, and manufacturer of a wide variety of advanced defense electronics and systems. The division had 120 locations worldwide, including 72 international offices, and approximately 24,000 employees. Accounting for 20% of company sales in 2005, it was the single largest sector in the corporation.
Telent Technology Services Limited is a British radio, telecommunications, and digital infrastructure systems installation and services provision company. The name was used from 2006 for those parts of the United Kingdom and German services businesses of Marconi Corporation which had not been acquired by Ericsson. Companies with Marconi in their name can trace their ultimate origins, through mergers and takeovers, to The Marconi Company Ltd, founded by Guglielmo Marconi in 1897 as The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company.
The General Precision Equipment Corporation was a major manufacturing company involved in the defense and space industries as well educational products and control devices for consumer goods. General Precision, Inc., was the principal operating subsidiary of General Precision Equipment Corp. headquartered in Tarrytown, New York.
Astronautics Corporation of America (ACA) was established in 1959 and is a US supplier, designer, and manufacturer of avionics equipment to airlines, governments, commercial and defense aircraft manufacturers, and other avionics systems integrators. Products are used for air, sea, ground, missile and space applications. Over 150,000 aircraft have been equipped with Astronautics equipment. Astronautics products electronic flight instrument systems, electronic flight bags, engine indicating and crew alerting systems, network server systems, multifunction displays, mission and display processors and systems, flight directors, flight control systems, inertial guidance systems, air data computers, and autopilots.
The ST-124-M3 inertial platform was a device for measuring acceleration and attitude of the Saturn V launch vehicle. It was carried by the Saturn V Instrument Unit, a 3-foot-high (0.91 m), 22-foot-diameter (6.7 m) section of the Saturn V that fit between the third stage (S-IVB) and the Apollo spacecraft. Its nomenclature means "stable table" (ST) for use in the moon mission (M), and it has 3 gimbals.
An inertial navigation system (INS) is a navigation device that uses a computer, motion sensors (accelerometers) and rotation sensors (gyroscopes) to continuously calculate by dead reckoning the position, the orientation, and the velocity of a moving object without the need for external references. Often the inertial sensors are supplemented by a barometric altimeter and sometimes by magnetic sensors (magnetometers) and/or speed measuring devices. INSs are used on mobile robots and on vehicles such as ships, aircraft, submarines, guided missiles, and spacecraft. Other terms used to refer to inertial navigation systems or closely related devices include inertial guidance system, inertial instrument, inertial measurement unit (IMU) and many other variations. Older INS systems generally used an inertial platform as their mounting point to the vehicle and the terms are sometimes considered synonymous.
The LN-3 inertial navigation system is an inertial navigation system (INS) that was developed in the 1960s by Litton Industries. It equipped the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter versions used as strike aircraft in European forces. An inertial navigation system is a system which continually determines the position of a vehicle from measurements made entirely within the vehicle using sensitive instruments. These instruments are accelerometers which detect and measure vehicle accelerations, and gyroscopes which act to hold the accelerometers in proper orientation.
Sir John Allen Clark was managing director of the British Plessey Company, an electronics and telecommunications group built up by his father, Allen George Clark. His career with Plessey was dominated by a battle with Arnold Weinstock of GEC for control of the company together with English Electric from the 1960s. This culminated in the late 1980s with the takeover and break-up of Plessey.
The Hemispherical Resonator Gyroscope (HRG), also called wine-glass gyroscope or mushroom gyro, is a compact, low-noise, high-performance angular rate or rotation sensor. An HRG is made using a thin solid-state hemispherical shell, anchored by a thick stem. This shell is driven to a flexural resonance by electrostatic forces generated by electrodes which are deposited directly onto separate fused-quartz structures that surround the shell. The gyroscopic effect is obtained from the inertial property of the flexural standing waves. Although the HRG is a mechanical system, it has no moving parts, and can be very compact.