Aselsan Defense Electronics & Cyber Naval Systems

ASELSAN Unveils MERCAN 100 Submarine Optronic Mast System

ASELSAN has shown off the MERCAN 100, a submarine optronic mast system designed to give Turkish boats a reconnaissance and surveillance capability without the hull penetration that older periscopes require. Türkiye’s state news agency Anadolu Ajansı detailed the system on November 5, 2026, days after ASELSAN displayed it at Euronaval 2026 in Paris as part of a wider slate of naval electronics the company brought to the show.

It is not a brand-new program. ASELSAN first showed physical MERCAN 100 and MERCAN 200 hardware at IDEF 2025 in Istanbul and at the Undersea Defence Technology (UDT) exhibition in Oslo the same year. The November briefing from Ankara is the clearest public description yet of what the system actually does, rather than a launch announcement.

What an optronic mast does that a periscope cannot

Classic periscopes run an optical tube straight through the pressure hull, which limits where they can be mounted and how a boat’s structure can be designed around them. An optronic mast instead carries cameras and sensors on a non-hull-penetrating mast that only needs an electrical and data feed through the hull, feeding video back to screens in the control room rather than to an eyepiece. The approach has become the standard for newer submarine designs worldwide over the past two decades.

According to ASELSAN’s own description, carried by Anadolu Ajansı, the MERCAN 100 combines mid-wave infrared, short-wave infrared and daytime television cameras in a single sensor head, giving crews multispectral imaging across different light and weather conditions. It also carries an eye-safe laser rangefinder for target positioning, a GPS and electronic-support antenna, and can be wired into a submarine’s combat management system rather than operating as a standalone optical device.

For search and surveillance, the mast offers a 360-degree panoramic mode described as a “rapid environmental surveillance” feature, alongside a narrower sector-scan mode for holding a fixed bearing on a specific contact. ASELSAN says the housing is built for sustained exposure to sea conditions and is designed to be adaptable across different submarine classes rather than built around one specific hull. Figures for detection range, resolution or depth rating have not been published, and none of the available reporting discloses them.

From research project to the trade-show floor

What has changed over the past two years is visibility, not the program’s age. ASELSAN has worked on submarine optronics for years without much public detail; 2025 and 2026 are when the company started putting physical MERCAN hardware in front of cameras at IDEF, UDT and now Euronaval, and when state media began describing what the finished system actually does rather than that it exists.

Submarine optronics is a narrow, specialised slice of the naval electronics market, long dominated by a handful of Western firms. A credible domestic alternative matters less for its dollar value than for what it signals: another system on Türkiye’s submarine fleet that does not depend on a foreign export licence to maintain or upgrade. That fits the pattern already visible in Roketsan’s AKYA heavyweight torpedo and in the fuel-cell air-independent propulsion fitted to the Turkish Navy’s new Reis-class boats, part of a broader push toward an indigenous submarine industrial base that is also meant to produce the future MİLDEN-class design.

ASELSAN has not said which Turkish submarine class, if any, is slated to carry MERCAN 100, nor has it named an export customer. The Euronaval appearance puts the system in front of the navies and shipbuilders that attend the Paris show, but a trade-show display is a marketing step, not a sale.

Part of a broader naval push

MERCAN 100 was one item in a larger ASELSAN naval line-up at Euronaval 2026, which also included the containerised GÖKDENİZ and GÖKSUR air-defence systems for merchant and auxiliary vessels, the TUFAN one-way-attack unmanned surface vessel, the KILIÇ family of autonomous underwater vehicles, the SMASH 30 remote naval gun, and the AINEO BOX image-processing add-on for electro-optical sensors. Company leadership has framed the push as an effort to carry over experience from ASELSAN’s drone-payload business into naval sensing and strike systems.

Türkiye fielded a record 16-company delegation at this year’s Euronaval, its largest showing yet at the biennial Paris exhibition, underlining how much of the country’s naval-electronics and shipbuilding industry is now chasing export business rather than only supplying the Turkish Navy.