Radar Debris Algorithms and Models for Discrimination

Radar data collected on U.S. domestic missile flight tests has revealed significant debris environments. Solid rocket boosters have been found to create particularly dense debris environments, but deployment hardware debris is typically also present, both for solid and liquid fuel boosters. Data collected on foreign tests has also indicated significant debris environments. It is important that the effects of debris on BMDS performance be well understood and its detrimental effects mitigated where necessary. The debris RCS modeling technique developed under this SBIR will help ensure that large-scale BMDS simulations accurately reflect realistic debris environments. Also, the prescreening technique makes it possible to quickly assign debris identification probabilities to many of the objects in a missile complex, typically after a few seconds of track, thereby enabling the defense to allocate its resources more effectively. In Phase I TSC demonstrated the feasibility of a debris RCS modeling technique. TSC will refine and fully automate the model in Phase II. The Phase I effort also generated quantitative prescreener performance results for a limited set of deployment and debris environment conditions. A much more expanded set of conditions will be examined during Phase II to mature the algorithm and characterize performance.