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A new air defense radar system is undergoing testing on White Sands Missile Range to ready it for later integrated testing with the Navy this fall.

The Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System, or JLENS, is an advanced radar system that is intended for use by the Army, Air Force and Navy as part of a larger air and missile defense network.

 ”In simple terms JLENS, is an elevated radar platform which is specifically designed to track and defeat land attack cruise missiles,” said Maj. Michael Fitzgerald an assistant product manager with the JLENS Product Office under Program Executive Office Missiles and Space.

The objective of the system is to provide a long range radar system that can detect small low flying targets like cruise missiles, as well as other airborne threats, so air defense systems can engage them sooner and with more accuracy.

Radar works by sending out radio waves into the air. When the waves hit something like an aircraft, they bounce off, reflecting back to the radar system and allowing the system to determine where the aircraft is. Unfortunately other objects like tall buildings, hills, and mountains can block the radar waves and disrupt or limit that radar. Cruise missiles are designed to take advantage of this limitation by flying low to the ground along routes that allow them to hide behind terrain.

“What the Aerostat allows you to do is get above the ground clutter. The whole objective of this system is to provide protection to ground assets that cannot see through mountains or other ground clutter,” said Steven Stone Raytheon’s test director for JLENS Integration at WSMR.

Using large blimp-like balloons called aerostats, JLENS seeks to counter the threat of low flying missiles and aircraft by taking a powerful surveillance radar to altitude, allowing the system to look down from heights of up to 10,000 ft. and over nearby terrain, eliminating blind spots and extending the range of the radar.

“The surveillance radar has a 360 degree capability, it kind of sees everything at once,” Fitzgerald said.

Since the elevated radar must look down to detect and track missiles and aircraft, the radar also gets back lots of data on the ground beneath the airspace it’s monitoring. For a normal radar, this would cause a lot of interference that could disrupt operations. JLENS ground station however, utilizes advanced computer systems that can filter out this ground clutter and leave the service member’s view screens with a clear image of the air they are defending.

Once a target has been located, a targeting radar system in a second aerostat can then lock onto the target and feed that data to air defense weapon systems. These systems would then be able to engage and destroy the target.

(For full article please see: http://www.asdnews.com)