How does a fighter plane know it’s been locked on by an enemy fighter?
In: Technology
In order to home in on something, you have to know where it is, and one way to know where things are is to use *radar* — that is, send out a beam of radio waves that bounces off of objects and comes back to the transmitter, painting a picture of what’s around it. A radar system that’s looking for targets has to scan the entire sky, so the number of times the radar track hits a target aircraft in a minute is relatively low.
When a radar system sees something it wants, it turns on a different radar that scans much more quickly to provide more accurate tracking data to the missile. Aircraft have cameras that see the radio waves being scanned across them; if they’re being painted very rapidly, that probably means a radar-tracking missile has acquired them.
There are other types of missile guidance that are harder to detect; heat-seeking missiles, for example, can’t be detected before launch, but can be tracked and evaded afterward, as it closes with the target.
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