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Will this help in detecting stealth aircraft since modern stealth aircraft have signatures of large insects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology#Mea
by espeed 14y ago
Will this help in detecting stealth aircraft since modern stealth aircraft have signatures of large insects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology#Measuring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology#Measuring)?
- cjg_ 14y agoStill need to distinguish between a large insect and a plane having the signature of a large insect. Otherwise you'd have a lot of false positives.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoIf it can track it continuously, I imagine speed will pretty much clear up any confusion.
- cjg_ 14y agoYeah, continuously is the point here. The frequency of the data points is largely dependent of the distance to the object. And you need to be able to identify the object in two subsequent images. I guess there's not that many insects at high altitudes either.
- enjo 14y agoCan't imagine that would be terribly difficult. They don't move like large insects for sure.
- fidotron 14y agoYou'd think in that case one large insect would move a lot faster than the other.
- johnhess 14y agoSeeing stealth aircraft isn't about resolution. The key to seeing something with radar is signal-to-noise ratio. From the article: "it becomes possible to measure the properties of individual raindrops greater than 0.5mm in diameter due to the low concentration of such drops in naturally occurring cloud systems and the overwhelming dominance such drops have on the measured radar reflectivity when present in a field comprised of smaller particles." It's easy to distinguish an airplane from something with a similar sized signature, say an insect, since the airplane moves at 1000knots instead of 1, but you have to be able to see it through the noise. That's tricky. If you use a radar like this (high power, really narrow beam) you might be able to see a stealth plane. But, you'd have to know where to point it. Therein lies the challenge.
- mturmon 14y agoSpecifically, article says the search volume is 14 m^3 -- a cube about 8 feet on each side. There are a lot of such cubes in, say, the airspace over a large city.
- willvarfar 14y agoInterestingly, there have always been radars able to see stealth planes, e.g. the Tamara radar used to shoot down the first-gen F117 over Serbia.
- tsotha 14y agoBut they could only pick it up when the aircraft was right on top of them, too late to launch SAMs. The method they used to down that aircraft can only really work if you already know where it is.