The Israeli air force is evaluating the Rafael Reccelite electro-optical pod. The system allows an aircraft carrying autonomous weapons to locate a target and inject its location or image into the weapon's guidance system through a ground station.
Reccelite was recently upgraded to supply almost real-time imagery data for launching such weapons. This reduces the sensor-to-shooter time to less than 10min, says Rafael.
The company says the RecceLite intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance system provides simple solutions to the problem of supplying near-real-time targeting data.
The system has an airborne reconnaissance pod, a datalink and ground exploitation station.
The reconnaissance pod collects images from infrared and daylight imaging sensors simultaneously and transmits them via datalink to the ground station. Imagery is recorded on a solid-state recorder in the pod. The ground station provides mission planning, image interpretation, storage/management of the system data and information dissemination.
Rafael has developed a new airborne electronic surveillance measures (ESM) direction finding and localisation system for manned and unmanned aircraft, and helicopters.
Top Scan, says Rafael, is a low-weight ESM system designed to detect, identify and locate ground- based emitters with high accuracy.
Rafael will not disclose the system's accuracy, apart from saying it is "better than 2°". Top Scan weighs 15kg (33lb), and a version for unmanned air vehicles has also been developed.
Rafael says Top Scan's algorithms allow the system to avoid ambiguity and multipath interference, and to handle dense electromagnetic environments.
Source: Flight International
