Infrared (IR) guided Man Portable Air Defence Systems (MANPADS) pose a serious threat to both civilian and military airborne platforms. In order to do research, develop and effectively deploy infrared flare countermeasures to ensure the survivability of the platform and aircrew, it is of the utmost importance to understand the threat and the capabilities thereof.
The characterisation of IR guided threats started in the 1960s and over the years the CSIR has built up strong capabilities and facilities, to enable the exploitation and analysis of threats.
These facilities include:
• Single-axis rate table including wideband collimator
• Flight motion simulator (3-axis)
• Laser jamming laboratory
• Wind tunnels
• Mobile captive seeker measurement laboratory
The output of the characterisation process is a high fidelity software model of the threat, used in survivability simulations. This provides a thorough understanding of the signal processing, counter-countermeasure (CCM) techniques, guidance, aerodynamic and kinematic behaviour of the specific threat of interest.
dpss@csir.co.za
