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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (5564)	11/21/2005 8:54:47 PM
From: RealMuLan	Respond to of 6370

New "Passive" Radar, under Development by Russia and China, Could Threaten Stealth Aircraft by John McWethy China, Russia, and several European and US companies are working on a new type of radar that could be used to make America's premier stealth aircraft far more detectable, intelligence sources. The cutting-edge work threatens to make today's most advanced stealth planes obsolete - the $40 billion fleet of B-2 bombers that saw its first action just two years ago in the air war over Kosovo and the older $6 billion fleet of F-117s. "In the end you may have to redesign your stealth aircraft or think about adding jamming or other countermeasures," says Dan Goure, a former Pentagon official who is a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia. hat could cost billions of dollars. And the new radar also could put US pilots in non-stealth aircraft at risk. In highly classified intelligence assessments, analysts worry that Iraq - with help from China - could be laying the groundwork for building such a system. That would pose a new and deadly threat to US and British pilots who patrol Iraq's "no-fly zones" and are regularly fired upon. "Passive" Radar Is Stealthy 1) Mobile phone masts normally are honeycombed across large areas, transmitting and receiving signals to provide a continuous service for users. They, and radio and television transmitters, produce a screen of radiation that can be distorted by moving aircraft. 2) Special receivers, scattered over an area, are used to receive radio frequency waves already in the atmosphere. 3) The receivers are linked to a high-performance computer that can process all the signal data and provide a graphical depiction of the aircraft location. 4) A global positioning satellite might be used to help pinpoint the location of the aircraft for targeting. 5) A US F-117 stealth aircraft is shaped so it is difficult to detect when traditional radar signals strike it head on. With the passive system, signals are transmitted from many fixed points near the ground. It's asserted they might bounce off the aircraft's fairly flat underbelly, making the plane easier to detect. Of immediate concern is that this so-called passive radar can also track all types of aircraft without the pilots knowing they are being watched or targeted. With conventional radar, pilots know when they are being tracked and can take appropriate action. Conventional radar sends out its own high-frequency signal that a pilot can detect. The new radar simply listens to low-frequency radio waves that are already in the atmosphere in great profusion, from power sources such as transmitters used for television, FM radio and cell phones. "And because there are quite a large number of transmitters that they can use for that purpose, it's quite effective," says Professor Hugh Griffiths of University College London. flatrock.org.nz