US company Ultra Maritime has unveiled Sea Spear, a ‘first-of-its-kind’ lightweight deployable sonar system to enhance submarine detection capabilities.
As the maritime domain shifts, submarines become more stealthy, and unmanned underwater vehicles grow in number. The company plans to present its solution for these undersea threats at Sea Air Space 2025 next week in National Harbor, Maryland.
The system is a 21-inch diameter unit that can be deployed from crewed or uncrewed surface and underwater platforms. The firm revealed that the technology is already well into its development phase and in-water testing, full operational demonstration will occur in 2025.
As part of a partnership, Ultra Maritime’s Sea Spear will be deployed with Anduril’s Seabed Sentry, a network of ‘cable-less’ deep-sea nodes that sense, process, and communicate critical subsea information in real-time.
Seabed Sentry can be deployed by AUVs to form a defense grid, supporting the protection of maritime regions and infrastructure. It has an open systems architecture for rapid integration of first- or third-party sensors and payloads customized to commercial or defense missions, including seabed survey, marine pattern of life building, port security, critical infrastructure protection, anti-submarine warfare, and anti-surface warfare. The technology uses artificial intelligence to provide highly accurate, persistent autonomous awareness on the seafloor.
Ultra Maritime has made significant investments that have fully qualified three new sonobuoy models with two additional qualifications in 2025, and towards creating the factory of the future configured specifically for sonobuoys. To remind, the firm recently won an £18 million contract from the UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) to supply sonobuoys to the Royal Navy’s Merlin maritime patrol helicopter.