Word: interceptor
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Less than three minutes after leaving Kwajalein, the interceptor--having discarded its boosters--will be flying solo. Zipping across the heavens at 4,900 m.p.h., it will be about 1,500 miles from its target. Over the next six to eight minutes, the interceptor will try to hunt down its prey and guide itself into a suicidal collision with the warhead. It will be receiving guidance from far below as early-warning radar systems detect the incoming warhead. These systems hand off data to a so-called X-band radar system based on Kwajalein, which stabs the sky with...
...band radar will send its data to the interceptor by way of a supersonic cell-phone system known as the in-flight interceptor communications system. Eventually, 14 IFICS stations will be built, arrayed in pairs in yet to be determined geographic regions. The Pentagon's environmental-impact statement says the pairings are needed to meet unspecified "reliability requirements." The Federation of American Scientists posits that placing the stations in pairs, fairly far apart, reduces the chances that in-flight communications will be lost because of storms that may develop over a single IFICS site...
Once free of its boosters, the interceptor's first job is to confirm where it is. It will do that by finding stars that match a map stored in its memory chips. Having fixed its own location, the interceptor will turn its telescope toward the target's expected location. As the interceptor and mock warhead travel to within 500 miles of each other, the interceptor should pick up the warhead, along with the decoy balloon and launch container. From here on out--in the final 100 seconds--the interceptor will be on its own, getting no guidance from the ground...
...Friday's test, the big, bright balloon will be the major decoy. (The launch container will play a similar but subordinate role.) But even Pentagon officials acknowledge that the balloon will act more like a beacon that alerts the interceptor to the nearby presence of the real target. The Pentagon concedes the October test might not have succeeded if the decoy hadn't appeared so vivid to the interceptor's sensors. "The large balloon aided in acquisition of the target," Coyle says. "It is uncertain whether the interceptor could have achieved an intercept in the absence of the balloon...
...simple decoy. The enemy could slip its warhead inside a decoy balloon and deploy it along with a dozen identical balloons, forcing the Pentagon into a futile effort to destroy all of them. The warhead might be cloaked in a shroud of liquid nitrogen, chilling it so that the interceptor's heat-seeking sensors couldn't find it. Chemical or biological weapons might be deployed in dozens of bomblets far too numerous to destroy...