Via Raytheon.

Someone alert Ian MacKaye: the U.S. Army has successfully tested its first surveillance blimp designed to watch over and defend D.C. from attacks.

As previously reported, it was announced that the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, or JLENS, was to be launched and tested from the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and, on Saturday, that test successfully happened, a release states.

So just what is this surveillance blimp going to be doing? “JLENS is strategically emplaced to help defend Washington D.C. and a Texas-sized portion of the East Coast from cruise missiles, drones and hostile aircraft,” Dave Gulla, vice president of Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems’ Global Integrated Sensors business—the company that engineered the blimp—said in a statement. “JLENS can detect potential threats at extremely long ranges, giving North American Aerospace Defense Command more time to make decisions and more space to react appropriately.”

The Raytheon engineers sent the football-field sized blimp thousands of feet in the air on Saturday to test its designs and will continue to do so over the next few days before it’s officially turned over to the Army to conduct “operational exercise.” Another blimp is scheduled to go airborne for tests early in 2015.