I was watching a youtube video about the b2 this morning. It mentions that while it’s not completely invisible to radar, it only has a cross section about the size of a bee. It says that radars have to fine tune their displays to only show larger objects or else it would be too cluttered.
I guess my question is, why can’t they tune their displays to only show objects moving faster than ~ 300 mph?
In: Physics
Short answer: noise.
With sensitivity so high to receive reflection from a bumblebee at such distances you will get a huge amount of noise, so a huge amount of fake targets, moving in random ways, appearing and disappearing. Filtering out the real target is difficult if not impossible.
Imagine old school TV’s black and white noise. Now I tell you there’s a “real” black dot moving somewhere in there, try to find it.
Latest Answers