Heat seeking bunkerbusters?

[Henry J. Cobb]

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20040105005460&newsLang=en
The recent flight tests follow hours of captive flight-testing and
successful free flights demonstrating the weapon's imaging infrared
(IIR) terminal seeker and autonomous targeting acquisition (ATA)
technology developed by Raytheon Missile Systems, Tucson, Ariz.

So the JSOW-C can be set to a GPS target, it can be guided by an IR
laser, it can lock onto and follow an infrared image and it has this
autonomous targeting acquisition (ATA) technology in addition?

So what does ATA do exactly? Do you program it to drop through a
cloud layer and look for the heat signature of a tank?

It seems that only the Navy is interested in this.

-HJC

[Thomas Schoene]

Henry J. Cobb wrote:
> So what does ATA do exactly? Do you program it to drop through a
> cloud layer and look for the heat signature of a tank?

Not quite. ATA lets the weapon look for particular pre-programmed target
shapes. It's mainly for picking the specific part of a pre-planned target
that you want to hit. It might get a more "spontaneous" capability later
on, but not in the near-term.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/docs/man-sm-agm154-010213.htm

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