An Airborne Captive Seeker with Real-Time Analysis Capability

The development of modern air defense missile systems requires robust simulations to adequately place margins on hardware and software design. Coupled with this is the need to accurately model surface reflections that constitute clutter to the missile system. A thorough understanding of these reflections is becoming increasingly important as the air defense threat evolves from large, high-altitude aircraft into small seaor landskimming aircraft, making the radar echo difficult to detect in the resulting surface clutter. The Applied Physics Laboratory has developed an airborne captive seeker, carried by a specially instrumented aircraft, that incorporates production Standard Missile system hardware to collect surface scattering data for clutter model development. The Captive Seeker System has a significant spectral processing capability that allows the received signals to be analyzed while still in the air. It has been used on various missile and radar programs over the last decade and is continually being upgraded to maintain its utility to missile system design at APL. (