It went thru the journalist filter a million times until unrecognizable.
The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing.
The flightpath of most Russia to US ICBMs would never have passed over the observatory, obviously, but it was a major radar technology research site in the early years.
>The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing.
Source? This seems unlikely since ground-based visual tracking would be obscured by e.g. clouds. Is ICBM tracking all space-based and visual? (I can see why IR is useful to detect the initial boost, but it would also seem rather useless to track a small, passive object in freefall).
DSP and more recently SBIRS are satellite-based systems, both use IR. If you track the missile to the end of it's burn you'll have a pretty good idea of where it's going after that -- ballistic trajectories are fairly predictable.
I'd imagine you'd have ground-based sensors for terminal interception refinement, but having a wide angle view to cover highly maneuverable glide vehicles would be useful too.
The IR systems are space-based and look for rocket plumes in the ascent phase. Once a rocket gets above the troposphere there's no clouds to obscure it. It's an intensely bright IR source that easily stands out from the -60°C surrounding atmosphere.
Just a second of observing the plume's trajectory will tell the difference between and orbital or ballistic one. Ballistic missiles will also be launched over the poles to travel the shortest distance to their targets. So IR plumes over the North Pole either means Santa's upped his present delivery game or there's an incoming ballistic missile attack.
They're mostly talking about the initial launch detection which is indeed IR based because it's going to be nearly impossible to hide the signature of a rocket launch of any useful size. After that flight tracking is a lot of different sources like radar.
Hmm ok I watched the video someone else linked here, apparently the telescope was used to check for facilities in Russia by checking the reflection of radio waves on the moon. Pretty cool stuff.
The first answer is ICBMs are, now a days, mostly an IR optical thing.
The flightpath of most Russia to US ICBMs would never have passed over the observatory, obviously, but it was a major radar technology research site in the early years.