Ultraviolet Surveillance Of Boosters And Post-Boost Vehicles

Stuart Bowyer; Mark Hurwitz

doi:10.1117/12.943592

13 April 1988 Ultraviolet Surveillance Of Boosters And Post-Boost Vehicles

Stuart Bowyer, Mark Hurwitz

Proceedings Volume 0868, Optoelectronic Technologies for Remote Sensing from Space; (1988) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.943592
Event: 1987 Symposium on the Technologies for Optoelectronics, 1987, Cannes, France

Abstract

A priority in the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) is development of a space-based system to detect, identify, and track ICBMs. We show that ultraviolet surveillance provides advantages unavailable in any other wavelength band. During boost phase it should be possible to identify vehicles by their UV emissions and to track the hard body by detection of the vacuum core. After burn out, UV emission from shocked gas at the vehicle tip may be detectable. This is particularly important for surveillance of "fast burn" boosters, which burn out at a low altitude and hence are virtually invisible to infrared sensors by the time they reach an altitude where the atmosphere is transparent to IR radiation. We discuss the feasibility of tracking conventional and fast-burn vehicles via UV surveillance from space. Estimates of the UV brightness of typical targets are provided. We also consider the ambient day and night time background and evaluate the signal to noise ratio achievable under various viewing scenarios. We discuss instrumentation which should be capable of detecting and tracking such targets from geosynchronous orbit. An added advantage of UV surveillance is the availability of sensitive, rugged UV detectors which are under development by both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

Citation Download Citation

Stuart Bowyer and Mark Hurwitz "Ultraviolet Surveillance Of Boosters And Post-Boost Vehicles", Proc. SPIE 0868, Optoelectronic Technologies for Remote Sensing from Space, (13 April 1988); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.943592

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