The ballistic missile, a symbol of the Cold War, got taken down a peg in July.
With the help of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), the United States Navy and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) have successfully conducted the Stellar Avenger exercise, a series of tests for its ballistic missile defense program.
On July 30, the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system tracked and destroyed a Standard Missile-3 Block IA (SM-3) ballistic missile that was launched from the Kauai Test Facility. This was the 19th success out of 23 firings.
Aegis, in Greek myth, was the shield of Athena; today, it is the shield of the US Navy. Designed to defend ships against attacks from the sky, Aegis detects incoming missiles or airplanes on radar and shoots them down using missiles of its own.
Ballistic missiles, derived from the World War II-era V-2 rocket which was used by the Germans in the bombing of London, are launched like ordinary rockets. They climb into the upper atmosphere until their engines burn out, at which point orbital mechanics takes over, taking the missiles in a shallow, decaying orbit. When the missiles re-enter the atmosphere, they do so in a ballistic trajectory, like a stone flung from a catapult, at tremendous speeds.
The US Navy's ballistic missile defense program seeks to intercept missiles before they re-enter the atmosphere. At that point, the missiles' engines have burnt out, so they cannot evade anti-ballistic missiles, leaving sufficient time to intercept them.
"Aegis BMD integrates the Aegis Combat System installed on U.S. Navy ships deployed around the world with the Standard Missile-3 to provide protection against short to intermediate range ballistic missile threats," said Kristi Marren, the public affairs representative for APL.
The Navy, with the help of the APL, has chosen to modify Aegis into a ballistic missile defense system, Aegis BMD 4.0.1.
"APL has been the technical direction agent for the Standard Missile-3 (the main missile used in Aegis BMD) since that program's inception," Marren said.
According to Mike Forehand, who leads the APL's program to help modify Aegis for ballistic missile defense, "We've been heavily involved in requirements and concept development for the new weapon system."
The APL has been involved in a variety of areas of research, ranging from helping adapt the radar to track ballistic missiles, to improving the software so it doesn't mistake satellites - or decoys - for actual ballistic missiles.
Furthermore, APL contributed significantly to the concept and technology development of the "kill assessment" test. Under these conditions, the Aegis system is able to determine whether or not the ballistic missile has been fully and successfully destroyed, so that one does not have to rely on human observations or radar data.
This test campaign also marked the beginning of the Flight Test Exercise '06, where the new Aegis system was installed aboard the USS Lake Eerie. For this test, no target missile was fired, but the system was able to perform a track and intercept simulation, while demonstrating its newly upgraded capabilities of improved detection, tracking and ability to perform in scenarios involving more complex targets.
APL's involvement in missile defense dates back to the World War II as well, when it was instrumental in the research, development and engineering of the anti-aircraft Variable Time fuse.
"APL pioneering many basic guided missile technologies... which led to [the] development of Standard Missile's predecessors," said Marren.
