Advanced Scene Generation Techniques

This effort extends the Fast Line-of-sight Imagery for Target and Exhaust Signatures (FLITES) scene generation program to include transient events that occur during the boost phase of ballistic missiles. The nominal transient events of interest includemissile staging, shroud ejection, countermeasures, thrust termination, and solid propellant chuffing. Our approach is to develop a generalized formulism that will allow a wide variety of transient events to be considered and efficiently modeled asfunctions of time.Transient event models are important to include with the baseline signature computations since they could adversely influence targeting algorithms. The Missile Defense Agency is sponsoring many programs to develop acquisition, tracking, classification,and discrimination algorithms to target missiles while in flight. Physics-based signature models play a critical role for these algorithm development activities by producing realistic imagery of the missile as it progresses along its flight path.Increasing realism of the scene attributes by including time-dependent transient events will greatly assist algorithm designers to create stable and robust solutions. This project will have wide appeal throughout the DoD since synthetic digital simulations are increasingly being utilized to test, evaluate, or derive new guided-munitions targeting algorithms. We anticipate this program has the potential to become astandard within the DoD industry when it is inserted into the FLITES scene generation code. The ability of missile defense organization to generate physically correct signatures of threat missiles that includes transient event phenomenology would benefitthe DoD by supporting: 1) algorithm development research, 2) hardware-in-the-loop testing to thoroughly examine the functionality of various flight hardware that includes hit-to-kill seeker systems, 3) and measurement and signature intelligenceapplications to determine specific system characteristics.Kinetics, Inc. has considerable knowledge and experience with the ballistic missile treat and the industry requirements necessary to support efforts to neutralize these threats. We are committed to providing the industry with high-fidelity signaturegeneration tools and will continue to advance their capabilities as new research is conducted.