Weapons Typing Assessment via Spectrally Diverse Sensors and Air Sample

This proposal will develop methods to determine the weapons type associated with Ballistic Missile Defense engagements. This development will use impact and debris track observations from active RF and passive EO/IR sensors. The goal is to increase efficacy and accuracy for which individual objects within the debris field can be tracked and characterized, when sensor fusion is employed. This information is useful to fulfill multiple MDA missions, including weapons typing and consequence management. For example the observation of a population of uniformly sized debris may suggest submunitions were present in the target, and/or the spectral observations of the debris cloud may indicate the presence of a chemical weapon. Threatening debris state vectors can be propagated to the ground for recovery or air sampling, and hazard zones for orbital platforms can be identified. The Phase 1 focus will be on the recent Aegis BMD intercept collections in order to develop the necessary track fusion, metric extraction, and data visualization tools on a recent collection with a wide variety of debris tracks. Later phases will extend this result to all MDA mission regimes, where multiple target types have been intercepted, in order to assess the utility of fusion for post-engagement weapons typing.