<title>Radiometric Navigation Update</title>

Abstract

Boeing Aerospace Company (BAC) of Seattle, Washington and Sperry Microwave Electronics of Clearwater, Florida have developed a multiple-beam radiometric navigation update system. This paper describes the system design, flight test program, and preliminary results. The system was designed and its performance evaluated using analytically derived formulas for performance measures and detailed Monte Carlo simulations. As a result BAC recommended a five or seven fixed beam radiometer. Sperry built a seven-beam, 35 GHz radiometer which BAC flight tested in 1979 to demonstrate its effectiveness over a variety of test scenes under various environmental conditions. Four scenes were selected for the flight test varying from land-water to highly forested regions. Preliminary analysis of the flight test results confirm the expected performance improvement over the single-fixed-beam system tested in 1975. This approach to a terrain sensing millimeter wave radiometer would be applicable to low altitude penetrating aircraft. The system is low cost, with no moving parts; low volume, requiring only a single receiver with small wide-beam antennas; and stealthy, being completely passive. Radiometry can also be complementary to todays terrain correlation approach since flat areas usually contain a maximum of cultural features; where one system works poorly the other works well. This test program provides a data base for studying a wide variety of pattern matching and correlation algorithms, with and without attitude compensation, and using various subsets of the full seven-beam combination.