Talk:Northrop Grumman Guardian

I don't get it.
How does shining a bright IR light directly from the bottom of the target aircraft "introduce a false target in the missile's scanner"? The missile tracks the IR radiation from the engines, and now there is an even brighter IR radiation source directly in front of it. My understanding of IR jammers is that they usually work roughly like shining a really bright spotlight at a person's eyes, it is so much it overwhelms the scanner and it cannot make out where the target is for the massive sun of IR energy ahead of it. This is not at all like "causing the scanner to show a false target". That can be done with radar wizardry, by messing with phases and wavelengths to trick the computer that processes this false "return signal" into thinking it's seeing something totally different than it is (in essence I believe it is making up a false "return signal" and transmitting it strongly enough to overwhelm the real return signal. But IR works on a much simpler basis: there is the radiation source, you can see it, follow it and hit it. There is no phase trickery and no return signal processing. If you show it an IR radiation source, it just measures where it is in the sky and flies at it, while radar has to analyze the signal to understand where the target is in front of it. I don't see any way of shining a light from a target in a way that will fool a scanner into thinking the light source is actually elsewhere. But then again I am not a tech wizard, and there may be much I don't know. But my understanding is the IR jammers don't create a false target, they create uncertainty as to just where the target IS. Not the same thing.

64.223.167.57 (talk) 06:13, 6 January 2019 (UTC)