Raytheon said its Airborne Low Frequency Sonar system would be the main undersea warfare sensor for the U.S. Navy's MH-60R multi-mission helicopter.

"These contracts continue Raytheon's long history of producing innovative, reliable and affordable undersea warfare systems," said Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems' Charles "Tom" Bush, vice president of Seapower Capability Systems.

Raytheon said the AN/AQS-22 Airborne Low Frequency Sonar system would give a major boost to the helicopters' undersea warfare mission support capabilities, "including submarine detection, tracking, localization, classification, acoustic intercept, underwater communication and environmental data collection."

The company said that as part of the deal it would also be supplying what it called "whole-life engineering" to maintain the AN/AQS-22 systems that were already operating in the Navy.

Raytheon said its production work on the AN/AQS-22 system had been speeded up since the Navy started to operationally deploy its new MH-60R helicopters in 2006. The company said that so far it had completed and handed over 14 AN/AQS-22 systems to the Navy and that it was working on another 28 of them that had already been ordered.

Raytheon said the systems were being manufactured at its Seapower Capability Center in Portsmouth, R.I., and by its AN/AQS-22 partners DRS Sonar Systems in

Gaithersburg, Md., and Thales Underwater Systems, Brest in France. Work on the contract is scheduled to be finished by 2010, the company said.