Rheinmetall delivers 300th MASS naval countermeasures system

Rheinmetall Waffe Munition GmbH’s Fronau branch delivered the 300th MASS Multi Ammunition Softkill System, a naval countermeasures system.

Coincidentally, the anniversary customer, the Finnish Navy, was also the system’s first customer, according to Germany’s Rheinmetall.

Launched onto the market in 2002, MASS is now in service with around 14 user nations.

Rheinmetall’s MASS family of ship protection systems is suitable for use by blue, green and brown water navies. It protects ships and boats against a wide range of threats – on the high seas as well as in coastal waters or on rivers.

The fully automated MASS decoy system offers protection against modern, sensor-guided missiles, covering all relevant wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

MASS can be installed on any type of vessel. Moreover, it can be integrated into an existing combat management system (CMS) or operate as a standalone system. Ordinarily, MASS consists of between one and six trainable launchers. Each launcher can fire 32 OmniTrap special effect charges. Each launcher comes with a control unit and a data interface.

Rheinmetall said it has steadily expanded its family of MASS ship protection systems. Two new variants of this decoy launcher system are the MASS_OCR with off-board corner reflector and the new standalone version MASS_ISS with integrated sensor suite for units that lack an independent capability for detecting laser and radar threats, etc.