A fact from Northrop Grumman Guardian appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 5 November 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:
This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.Military historyWikipedia:WikiProject Military historyTemplate:WikiProject Military historymilitary history articles
This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-class status:
This article is within the scope of the Aviation WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see lists of open tasks and task forces. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.AviationWikipedia:WikiProject AviationTemplate:WikiProject Aviationaviation articles
This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-class status:
How does shining a bright IR light directly from the bottom of the target aircraft "introduce a false target in the missile's scanner"? The missile tracks the IR radiation from the engines, and now there is an even brighter IR radiation source directly in front of it. My understanding of IR jammers is that they usually work roughly like shining a really bright spotlight at a person's eyes, it is so much it overwhelms the scanner and it cannot make out where the target is for the massive sun of IR energy ahead of it. This is not at all like "causing the scanner to show a false target". That can be done with radar wizardry, by messing with phases and wavelengths to trick the computer that processes this false "return signal" into thinking it's seeing something totally different than it is (in essence I believe it is making up a false "return signal" and transmitting it strongly enough to overwhelm the real return signal. But IR works on a much simpler basis: there is the radiation source, you can see it, follow it and hit it. There is no phase trickery and no return signal processing. If you show it an IR radiation source, it just measures where it is in the sky and flies at it, while radar has to analyze the signal to understand where the target is in front of it. I don't see any way of shining a light from a target in a way that will fool a scanner into thinking the light source is actually elsewhere. But then again I am not a tech wizard, and there may be much I don't know.
But my understanding is the IR jammers don't create a false target, they create uncertainty as to just where the target IS. Not the same thing.
