Extending the Surveillance Horizon for Improved Ship Self-Defense Against Cruise Missiles

The goal of this program is to complete the design of a radar mode for the detection and discrimination of supersonic cruise missiles (SCM’s) at long ranges by medium to high altitude airborne maritime surveillance radars capable of providing early cueing of ship self-defense systems. RDRTec will continue to advance our modular Challenging-target Airborne Detection & Discrimination (CADD) testbed, which was expanded for hypersonic cruise missiles (HCM’s) in phase I, to provide the tools needed to evaluate supersonic and hypersonic target detection/tracking modes. With our partners, we will produce additional simulations of SCM and clutter RF signatures that provide vital insight into the scattering mechanisms as a function of grazing angle, altitude, kinematic, look direction relative to the sea, and radar operating frequency.  Our approach addresses the challenges posed by speed, maneuverability, and flight altitudes, including the necessity to account for a variety of motion models and multiple hypothesis tracks and the trade-off between wider area coverage and early detection and tracking.