Abstract
The U-2 is the premier high altitude Armed Services platform for all reconnaissance and intelligence data collection. The U-2's primary imaging sensor is the ASARS-2 (Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System-2) which is an all weather day/night radar capable of providing near real-time imagery through various collection modes. The Air Force Reconnaissance System Program Office through the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO) and Secretary of the Air Force, (Acquisition) Directorate of Information Dominance (SAF/AQIJ) is currently upgrading the airborne radar, data-links, and ground processing and exploitation components to provide increased coverage, improved image quality, and provide a near real-time targeting capability for precision guided munitions. The ASARS-2 Improvement Program (AIP) will be discussed to include the hardware changes to the sensor, software changes to the ground station and new exploitation tools. AIP will increase the area coverage of the current ASARS-2 system through the use of new airborne components. The system will employ full on-board processing allowing detected, complex. or Video Phase History products and maintain the requirements for the collected sensor data to fit within the current 274 Mb/sec bandwidth of the air-ground Data Link. Through the use of complex imagery data, the AIP program will augment the ground processing and exploitation segment with specialized imagery enhancing tools. Some of the tools under evaluation include; Spatially Variant Apodization, Interferometric SAR, Multi-view, Coherent Change Detection, Super-Resolution, and Moving Target Indication products. AIP will also significantly improve the geolocation targeting accuracy of SAR imagery for use with GPS aided munitions. AIP will become the standard for all future high attitude imaging radar systems and is being developed to be compatible with the Global Hawk (Tier II+) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.
Published Version
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