China has just made another move on the hypersonic missile war game board. An incredibly accurate laser-based radar system has been announced that would be able to track objects ripping through the sky at over four miles per second.
The radar system was developed by Zheng Xiaoping, a professor at Tsinghua University’s department of electronic engineering who has spent decades working on ultra-fast optical communication. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports that a paper describing the research has been published in the Chinese journal, Optical Communication Technology.
In it, Zheng and his team describe ground-based simulations that showed the system could track a missile traveling at almost 4.3 miles (7 km) per second with an error rate of just 11 inches (28 cm). The system was also able to estimate the missile's speed with a 99.7% accuracy rate. It can reportedly operate over a range of 373 miles (600 km).
Hypersonic missiles are considered to be any missile traveling at over Mach 5, or about one mile per second. The test of the new system showed that it could be effective at tracking missiles traveling at Mach 20.
The breakthrough in the radar system is the use of lasers combined with three different bands of microwave communications. This not only allows the detector to send communications between nodes at the speed of light, but also sidesteps the problem of heat generation from the rapidly moving electrons that were thought necessary in such high-speed detection. This heat can easily burn out circuit boards, rendering them useless.
The use of the multi-band microwave signals, combined with an algorithm invented by Zheng's team, also improved the system's accuracy, reducing the number of phantom images detected.
The announcement of the new system comes just months after the United States Air Force demonstrated a test of a hypersonic missile built by Lockheed Martin in the waters around the Marshall Islands. That test was largely seen as a message to China that the US is on equal footing with its country and Russia in terms of the development of these superfast missiles – a field of weapons development in which it has lagged.
Hypersonic missiles are highly maneuverable and able to fly low. This is in contrast to intercontinental ballistic missiles that follow a predictable arc through the air after they are launched. It's believed that their speed and maneuverability would allow them to evade anti-missiles systems and, until now, radar-detection systems.
While the radar system has thus far only been tested in ground-based simulations, SCMP says that it is small enough to be mounted on planes or on the heads of air-defense missiles.
Source: South China Morning Post
