Loading patent…
AssigneeCambridge Consultants Limited
InventorsGordon K. A. Oswald, Christopher S. Neal, Alan T. Richardson
Estimating the term…
A system for determining the trajectory of a missile and the minimum miss distance with respect to a target aircraft, comprises two transmitters on the aircraft each cooperating with four receivers on the aircraft. Each transmitter radiates a succession of pulses each having a very short duration of the order of 2 nanoseconds and each having a shape approximating to a single sine wave. The transmitted pulses are reflected from the missile and received by the receivers each of which is accurately time gated so that the received signal is sampled at a predetermined time delay after the radiation of each transmit pulse. A time delay corresponds to a particular missile range, and by gating at different delays the sampled signals indicate when the missile enters or leaves a plurality of range envelopes surrounding the target. Processing of the sampled signals enables the missile trajectory and minimum miss distance to be computed.
A system for sensing the approach of a moving missile to a target, comprising transmitting means on the target for transmitting a succession of transmit pulses, receiving means on the target for receiving the pulses reflected by the missile, gating means on the target for sampling the reflected pulses received at the receiving means during a succession of time windows each of which is delayed with respect to the time of transmission of a corresponding transmit pulse by a predetermined time delay corresponding to the pulse travelling a predetermined distance from the transmitting means to the missile and thence back to the receiving means, so that sampled signals from the receiving means are indicative of the missile entering or leaving a notional envelope surrounding the target at a range corresponding to said predetermined time delay, processing means which are responsive to the sampled signals and which compute the approach of the missile, and pulse generating means included in the transmission means, for generating said transmit pulses, each of which commences, from a level of no significant transmitted power in the frequency bandwidth of the pulse, with a rapid rise to a power peak and a rapid fall such that each transmit pulse consists substantially of a single radio frequency cycle and such that the sampled signals indicate reflected pulses from the missile.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.