The typical 70 mm diameter towed array was developed for blue-water detection at long range and low frequencies in the 1960s. Since then, there has been a need for towed arrays that are lighter and less expensive, especially since the maturing field of autonomous vehicles has expanded the potential of such arrays. The marriage of AUVs and lightweight towed arrays is a natural progression in the development of littoral autonomous sensing networks for applications such Anti-Submarine Warfare, marine mammals, or ambient noise measurements. In August 2007, NURC began to design and build a new thin diameter (31 mm) high-frequency (up to 20 kHz) nested towed array for ASW purposes. An engineering at-sea trial of the array towed by OEX AUV was performed beginning of November 2007. The flow noise level of the array while towed and the potential influence of the AUV self-noise on the acoustic array were also measured. This paper will first describe the array design, its acquisition system and its integration on the OEX AUV. Then, the results obtained from the data analysis are presented. It is shown that the SLITA array has performance that will make it easily fit requirements of the applications previously mentioned.
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