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The new microwave photonic radar can track 10 hypersonic missiles traveling up to Mach 20 and distinguish between false positives and genuine targets with a range of 600 km. It was developed by a team from Tsinghua University’s Department of Electronic Engineering.
The radar is reportedly small and lightweight thus suitable for loading onto air defense missiles or planes. It demonstrated impressive accuracy in ground-based simulations, estimating a missile’s distance at nearly 7 km per second with an error margin of just 28 cm, as well as yielding an unprecedented 99.7% accuracy in estimating the missile’s speed.
The South China Morning Post reports that the team successfully addressed the challenge of creating and analyzing high-precision radar signals by integrating lasers into the radar design, a breakthrough that allows information to be transmitted between essential points at the speed of light. If these claims are indeed true, they would enable the system to produce and analyze intricate microwave signals and accurately measure ultra-high-speed objects.
According to Interesting Engineering, this is considered a key technology for the next generation of fire-control radars among military experts, which will prove critical when there is a lot of international attention on hypersonic weapons that are extremely difficult to intercept because of their high speed and maneuverability. This is the reason that many countries worldwide are currently developing hypersonic missiles and improving their defense capabilities against them.
Another issue in creating effective defense capabilities against high-speed moving targets is that they sometimes create phantom images on radar screens, and these “false targets” often outnumber the real ones. The research team solved this problem by using laser technology that enables the radar to send three different microwave bands, improving detection accuracy simultaneously, as well as an algorithm that eliminates false target interference by comparing signals of different frequencies.
The team constructed a complete radar system and verified its performance in a laboratory using instruments that simulate the movement of hypersonic targets in the atmosphere. This breakthrough could significantly affect the development of hypersonic weapons and defense systems worldwide.
