Sensors and Surveillance: Adaptive Waveform Coherent Ladar for Long Range Tracking, Discrimination, and Kill Assessment

"BMDO desires effective ways to acquire and track ballistic missiles/payloads, improve intercept prospects, and assess results of intercepts. Current approaches may have insufficient range or discrimination capability, require more platforms/interceptorsand more expensive defense than desired, or have unacceptable target leakage/false alarm rates. Passive systems, even with projected technology, lose too much discrimination performance and battlespace to evolving threats. Currently conceived ladarsystems either have insufficient range and discrimination performance, or may include immature technologies which threaten reasonable deployment timeframes. CTI proposes a novel coherent ladar/processing/tracking system, which makes acquisition in theboost phase, and discrimination in the post-boost phase possible?before effective deployment of decoys and other countermeasures. Precision updates after initial discrimination facilitates tracking and target/decoy track separation duringheavily-countermeasured midcourse. This is made possible by a very efficient ladar, with near-term technology, many-pulse averaging and long-range sensing/processing of angle-angle-range-Doppler signatures. Initial assessments indicate reduction inconstellation size over passive-only constellations, for fixed discrimination capability. This approach achieves resilience against threat growth, and discrimination capabilities otherwise unreachable. Finally,