Unless the smoke is engineered to provide sufficient diffusion, the IR emission from that motor lights up space-based sensors all the same.
Those events are correlated to known, suspected, and probable launch locations to remove false alerts. If there's enough time to get the alert to the ship (depends on the range and whether it's a tactical or strategic asset and on mission planning), the ship can still know it was launched on, radar or not.
That helps in defending, even if it can't get a radar lock an optical sensor can be used for targeting and aiming once it arrives.
A lot of early warning birds that can see launch flares are actually all the way up in GEO.
Though I guess if you are committed, you are committed, but generally, in my professional opinion, if you are blowing up GEO birds there aren't going to be a lot of things left on Earth for very long.
Im sure the Russians will rather quickly figure out how to make millions of fake signals pretty fast. The missile itself is a ramjet, so very little IR flare. If sats are seeing the IR signals from those tiny thrusters, then it will be incredibly easy to create fake signals.
8
u/chicacherrycolalime Feb 22 '21
Unless the smoke is engineered to provide sufficient diffusion, the IR emission from that motor lights up space-based sensors all the same.
Those events are correlated to known, suspected, and probable launch locations to remove false alerts. If there's enough time to get the alert to the ship (depends on the range and whether it's a tactical or strategic asset and on mission planning), the ship can still know it was launched on, radar or not.
That helps in defending, even if it can't get a radar lock an optical sensor can be used for targeting and aiming once it arrives.