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| Science & Technology | ||
| Industry, MDA Buoyed By Thaad Success | ||
| 2009-08-19 | ||
Recent flight tests--including a challenging trial in March--have boosted developers' confidence in the kinetic-kill system. Two different Thaad interceptors were launched against a single target, simulating an Army operational concept of dispatching a salvo of weapons to ensure a threat is destroyed. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and industry officials declared the flight test a success shortly after it was executed. However, they disclosed to Aviation Week only recently that the results exceeded their expectations. Early reports from the Pentagon said the second interceptor was intentionally destroyed in flight after the first disabled the target in a hit-to-kill engagement. "Actually, what happened on the flight test was that the first interceptor hit just as it was supposed to and the second interceptor looked at all of this debris and said, 'OK, I've got another something that looks interesting,' picked out another threat, and went out and killed it," says Tom McGrath, Thaad vice president for prime contractor Lockheed Martin. "The second intercept hit another piece of hardware. We can't talk about what that was, but it picked out what logically you would expect it to pick out and killed it." The two missiles were launched 12 sec. apart. The successful intercept of a fragment from the remaining debris is notable because the second interceptor was faced with what is called a "complex target scene." This included the wreckage of the target shortly after the first high-speed collision. "We had it timed [so] that the second kill vehicle would see the intercept of the first and see the target scene," says U.S. Army Col. William Lamb, the MDA's Thaad project manager. The engagement also demonstrates the ability of the mission computer on board the Thaad interceptor to adapt to a rapidly changing threat scene. "In real short time, it said, 'Uh oh, that doesn't look like what the radar told me it was going to be'--because now, of course, it was looking at a debris field instead of something that was not planned to be a debris field," says McGrath. MDA officials declined to say whether the target deployed countermeasures. Of the six flight tests and successful intercepts since a missile redesign, five of the targets have been "foreign-acquired targets, against the real thing," not a U.S.-designed threat emulator, says Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly. He is the MDA director who oversaw Thaad during the redesign period. "Many of those targets were shot from an asymmetric threat point of view of putting the missile on a barge [and setting] it off at sea," he says. Thaad was originally designed to act autonomously, which means its own AN/TPY-2, X-band radar would acquire a target, track it and cue the missile. Once launched and nearing its target, the interceptor's infrared seeker would read the target scene. It would then sort out the input from the radar and from IR to discriminate the kill vehicle from countermeasures or clutter. Blending the two data sources helps the system discriminate actual threats from simulated ones. "Things look different to an X-band sensor than they do to an IR sensor. Something that really has a lot of sharp edges . . . will look big and bright to an RF [sensor], but it might be real, real cold," says McGrath. "So, it doesn't look that way to an IR [sensor]. I like to think of this as our two-color approach to life." The flight trial, which took place at the Pacific test range, also included another first. A Navy Aegis-equipped ship cued Thaad with data on the target. This means the Aegis radar acquired the target first and redirected the Thaad radar to find the target. "We actually, on this flight, pointed it higher than we typically would for a search so that for sure Aegis would get that target--and it was closer to it--and we would not see it until after they cued us," McGrath says. "We've worked with Aegis before ourselves, but the cues have never gone to the shooter. It has always gone to other ships."
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #1 The Dems better cancel this to prove it won't work. |
| Posted by: gorb 2009-08-19 11:46 |