Sarah Armstrong, director of the Joint Hypersonics Transition Office (JHTO) Systems Engineering Field Activity at Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane Division, said her work involves looking for “similarities between program needs and ways to maximize investments,” Naval Sea Systems Command reported Monday.
“I look at today’s research and state-of-the-art systems and determine how they can help carry out the long-term strategy for the hypersonics enterprise,” she added.
The office of the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering’s JHTO created the systems engineering field activity at NSWC Crane in Oct. 2020 and Armstrong said one reason behind the move is that the division has the capability to establish a connection between research and the warfighter.
“We have a history of looking at what’s in the research world and connecting that with the needs of our customers,” Armstrong said. “We also have a host of capabilities from a systems engineering view, modeling and simulation view, and testing view. That helps us take these ideas into a fieldable capability.”
She also cited the importance of communication in accelerating tech deployment and shed light on her work at NSWC Crane.
“My job is to take the systems engineering view of the overall hypersonics strategy and break it down to pieces of approachable technologies for the research community to address. We then accelerate the transition of those technologies into program implementation,” Armstrong said.
