Raytheon Company

Paul H Oglesby

Michael S Bielas

Thomas M Crawford

Richard A Paiva

An MKV interceptor includes a carrier vehicle (CV) that supports the deployment of M kill vehicles (KVs) and provides centralized acquisition and discrimination pre-ejection. Pre-ejection each KV acquires and transmits IR imagery, and possibly visible imagery, via an internal communication bus to a central processor on the CV. The central processor spatially registers the IR images from the different KVs, either directly from the IR images themselves or using the visible imagery, and sums the IR (and visible) images to form a registered spatially averaged IR image. This image has the same resolution but higher SNR than any one of the KV IR images. The central processor uses this registered spatially averaged image during pre-ejection acquisition and discrimination modes. The key benefit is the elimination of independent CV 'sense capability', which is large, heavy and expensive, and was required by either the 'command guided' or 'sharing' concepts.

Growing community of inventors

Oro Valley, AZ, United States of America

Paul H Oglesby