American IRST Finally Catches Up

On February 11th the U.S. Navy had its first flight test of a new IRST (Infa-Red Search & Track) pod. IRST uses a high resolution infrared (heat sensing) radar to positively spot and identify a potential aerial target This is done by comparing what IRST sees to 3-D models of known aircraft stored in the pod computer. This is similar to the ATFLIR (Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared) pods used to spot surface targets.

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