israel
The Secret of the Wonder Weapon That Israel Will Show Off to Obama
An Israeli missile from the Iron Dome defense system is launched to intercept and destroy incoming rocket fire from Gaza in Tel Aviv on Nov. 17, 2012
No tour of Middle East conflict zones could be complete without a stop at Sderot, an Israeli town of 24,000 that stands uncomfortably close to the Gaza Strip. The rain of rockets out of the Palestinian enclave has made Sderot famous for two things: the thickness of its roofs (even bus stops have reinforced concrete tops); and the collection of crumpled missiles arrayed in racks behind the police station. As a visiting VIP in 2008, U.S. Senator Barack Obama dutifully inspected what the machine shops of Islamic Jihad and Hamas fashioned from lengths of pipe and scrap metal. Low-tech doesn’t begin to cover it.
It’s a long way up the Mediterranean coast from Sderot to Haifa, and even farther to the showroom of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., the weapons-development branch of Israel’s military-industrial complex. Hi-tech doesn’t begin to cover it. Rafael developed the first precision-guided munitions — the precursor to the American-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions that replaced “dumb bombs” — and scores of other battlefield innovations, from IED detectors to floating drones. But the company’s most acclaimed invention is the one now President Obama will inspect moments after arriving in Israel on Wednesday: Iron Dome. It is a missile-interception system that has performed what Israelis regard as a miracle, draining a good bit of the fear out of the wail of an air-raid siren. During the last Gaza conflict, which lasted a week in November, Iron Dome knocked out of the sky a reported 84% of the missiles it aimed at — that is, the ones headed toward population centers. The rockets headed for open space its computers simply let fall. Rafael executives are understandably proud of Iron Dome, which after a few months on the job is performing at the level of a system that’s had seven years to work out the kinks. But they appear even prouder of the unlikely philosophy behind it. To make the most-tested, if not the most effective antimissile system in military history, Israeli engineers took a page from the Gaza militants they aimed to frustrate. The secret to Iron Dome is that it’s cheap.
(MORE: Iron Dome’s Lessons for the U.S.)
Consider the problem of volume. Since 2005, Gaza militants have fired more than 4,000 of their homemade rockets into Israel. Most cost a few hundred dollars each. Interceptors typically cost a few hundred thousand. “The main question that everyone asks is, ‘You’re firing a very costly missile against something very cheap,’” says Joseph “Yossi” Horowitz, a retired air-force colonel who markets air-and-missile defense systems at Rafael. “So our main mission was to reduce the cost.”
The economizing would be across the board, but the biggest savings were realized by reducing the size of the missile’s eyes — by far the most expensive component. An interceptor missile locks onto its target by following directions from the radar in its nose cone, typically packed with radio-frequency sensors of extravagant unit cost. An interceptor carried by a fighter jet has to be very smart, because it’s expected to find a missile being fired in its direction before it’s even in sight, one that could come from any direction. The nose-cone radar of an AIM/AMRAAM has so many RFs, or radio-frequency nodes, that it runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But a homemade missile coming out of Gaza is simply ballistic: it goes up and comes down. Rafael realized its launch and trajectory can be detected by ground radar, which would then transmit that information to the Iron Dome interceptor launched into the area of the sky where it’s headed. Only when the two missiles come near one another does the interceptor’s own radar come alive, guiding it to the incoming Qassam or GRAD and colliding with its own nose — where the warhead is positioned — in midair. It’s a delicate business, what with each missile traveling at 700 m per second.
“I can bring the interceptor in an accurate way, near the target, which means I can use the radar, the ‘seeker’ for a very short time,” says Horowitz. The shorter the time, the fewer the RF sensors required. “Saves money,” he says. How much? “Two digits: from hundreds of thousands of dollars to several thousand dollars.”
Read more: http://world.time.com/2013/03/19/the-secret-of-the-wonder-weapon-that-israel-will-show-off-to-obama/#ixzz2O0I6EjnK
Subject: The Secret of the Wonder Weapon That Israel Will Show Off to Obama 
Tue Mar 19, 2013 11:29 am
up guys....
... ian
