Italy’s new Michelangelo air defence system completes first long-range missile interception test.

Leonardo said the Michelangelo Security Dome logged its first operational marker following a December 3 SAMP/T NG qualification firing in Italy, which used the Kronos Grand Mobile High Power radar to guide an Aster interceptor to a land trial range not previously reached.

On December 9, 2025, the Italian company Leonardo announced that its Michelangelo Security Dome reached a first operational milestone after an Italian SAMP/T NG air defense system used the Kronos Grand Mobile High Power radar to guide an Aster interceptor at a range not previously achieved in land trials. According to the company and officials familiar with the trial, the engagement pushed the Eurosam system to a new land-based range record for an Italian firing and served as an early demonstration of how individual radars, effectors, and command modules could be fused inside a national multi-domain defensive structure.
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Leonardo recorded the first operational milestone of its Michelangelo Security Dome on December 3, 2025, when an Italian SAMP/T NG air defense system paired with the Kronos GMHP radar achieved an interception at a range not previously reached in land trials. (Picture source: Leonardo)

Less than ten days after the official launch of the Michelangelo in Rome, the qualification firing on December 3, 2025, used an Italian SAMP/T NG surface-to-air missile guided by this latest generation radar to an interception at a distance not previously reached by the Eurosam SAMP/T system during land trials. The event took place within the framework of Italian ground-based air and missile defence modernisation and is described as an early step in the practical implementation of the Italian Dome concept. Leonardo places this result within a broader effort to propose the Michelangelo as a framework capable of linking national assets and contributing to a possible European integrated air and missile defence architecture.

The Kronos Grand Mobile High Power (KGMHP) radar used in the test is a C-band multifunction active electronically scanned array designed for air and missile surveillance and defence in land and littoral environments. It uses high-efficiency Gallium Nitride (GaN) transmit-receive modules that increase detection range by more than 30 percent compared to earlier Gallium Arsenide-based configurations and builds on more than a decade of Kronos operational experience on land and at sea. The radar has an instrumented range of about 250 km in defence mode and 300 km in air surveillance, with altitude coverage of roughly 30,000 m and elevation coverage of 90 degrees in both surveillance and tracking. It can track at least 500 targets while engaging up to 30 simultaneously, with one-second update rates for engaged tracks and jammers and four seconds for non-engaged tracks in standard modes. An optional counter rocket, artillery, and mortar function allows monitoring of a wide azimuth and elevation field of view, while the system is installed in 20-foot ISO shelters with optional separate power and command modules that can be deployed on unprepared sites in less than 15 minutes by two operators and controlled locally or remotely with high availability figures.

The SAMP/T NG employed in the firing is part of the Franco-Italian family of medium and long-range ground-based air defence systems built around the Aster missile series. In its new generation form, the SAMP/T NG combines a more capable AESA multifunction radar, such as Leonardo's Kronos Grand Mobile High Power, with Aster 30 B1NT interceptors and up to six vertical launchers carrying eight ready-to-fire missiles each, all coordinated by an engagement module and connected through land-based links. The Aster 30 missile family provides engagement ranges on the order of 150 km against aircraft and offers capabilities against tactical ballistic missiles launched from several hundred kilometres away, with short reaction times and high rates of fire that can be managed by a relatively small crew. The two-stage missile uses an inertially guided mid-course phase with data updates from the engagement module and an active radar seeker in the terminal phase, combined with aerodynamic control surfaces and lateral thrusters around the centre of gravity that preserve manoeuvrability across its flight envelope. Within the Michelangelo Security Dome concept, the SAMP/T NG is one of several effectors that can be tasked by higher-level command and control in response to different categories of aerial and missile threats.

The Michelangelo itself is defined by Leonardo as a modular, open, and scalable multi-domain architecture rather than a single weapon system, intended to protect critical infrastructure, sensitive urban areas, national territory, and European assets. It combines next-generation land, naval, airborne, and space sensors with cyber defence platforms, command and control systems, artificial intelligence, and coordinated effectors to create a security dome that can detect, track, and engage threats during limited or large-scale attacks. The list of threats considered includes missile and air attacks, such as hypersonic weapons and drone swarms (as now commonly seen in Ukraine), surface and subsurface attacks at sea, and hostile ground forces that could threaten bases, ports, airports, industrial facilities, urban centres, and major events. The architecture is intended to remain compatible with current and future defensive assets and platforms of other nations and to align with NATO standards so that national systems that were not originally designed to interoperate can be connected within a shared structure.

At its core, the Michelangelo Security Dome uses a higher-layer C5 system based on a newly designed MC5 C5I module that can connect to existing tactical C2 subsystems across domains. This module is intended to shift from a traditional linear kill chain, where one sensor is linked to one shooter, to a kill web model in which a sensor can be matched with the most suitable shooter in terms of position, timing, and type of effect. The system is designed to perform computational analysis on data streams from radars, satellites, infrared detectors, and other sensors that can reach hundreds of terabytes per second, supported by high-performance computing infrastructure and artificial intelligence routines to reduce decision times and optimise the allocation of ships, ground-based batteries, air assets, and other platforms. Development is carried out by an integrated team that includes the Italian Ministry of Defence and the armed forces, with a first iteration of the architecture, named Dead Zone, planned for delivery to the Italian Ministry of Defence by the end of 2027 after integration with existing integrated air and missile defence and space-based sensors. Additional systems are planned over the following two years, with the possibility of federated solutions with interested allied states within about four years and an objective of full operational capability before the end of the decade.

The space and sensor layers around Michelangelo include optical and radar satellites already in service, such as OPSAT 3000 and the Cosmo SkyMed Second Generation X-band synthetic aperture radar constellation, as well as future constellations of very high resolution optical platforms in low Earth orbit. Plans include additional ISR and tracking satellites and satellite communications systems designed to provide a high-throughput transport layer linking ground, sea, air, and space nodes. On the ground, Italy and Leonardo are working on new fixed long-range radars derived from the Kronos Power Shield technology with ranges above 2,000 km intended for ballistic and hypersonic detection, together with S-band radars for future Italian surface combatants that will complement existing naval and land-based sensors and missile systems such as the SAAM ESD and the Aster family. The industrial model foresees Leonardo supplying sensors, command systems, cyber and space components, while other Italian and European firms provide platforms and effectors, for example, Fincantieri for naval platforms and MBDA for missiles, with the architecture able to accommodate third-party systems from partner states.

In the wider European context, the Michelangelo Security Dome is seen as a possible response to fragmentation between national air and missile defence systems and as a potential complement to cooperative efforts such as the European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI). It is conceived as a unifying operational layer that could coordinate diverse national systems, enable interoperability where it did not previously exist, and remain compatible with NATO doctrine and with different procurement choices such as Iris-T, Patriot, or Arrow 3 in participating countries. The concept is also placed alongside other dome-type architectures pursued internationally, including initiatives in the United States, China, Israel, and Turkey that rely on constellations of space-based sensors and interconnected defence systems, while Italy proposes a multi-domain, artificial intelligence-supported framework that includes both civil and military assets.

Written by Jérôme Brahy

Jérôme Brahy is a defense analyst and documentalist at Army Recognition. He specializes in naval modernization, aviation, drones, armored vehicles, and artillery, with a focus on strategic developments in the United States, China, Ukraine, Russia, Türkiye, and Belgium. His analyses go beyond the facts, providing context, identifying key actors, and explaining why defense news matters on a global scale.