Tracking missiles with mosaic starers

Staring mosaic sensors with as many as 20 million elements are under development by the Strategic Defense Initiative Office and may require a decade or more of research effort before production is considered feasible. While conventional IR sensors scan rows of sensing elements across a focal plane, staring mosaics cover the entire focal plane with a two-dimensional sensor array; this allows them to better reject background clutter and detect cool reentry vehicles against a warm background. A 1024 x 1024-mosaic array has a thousand times as many elements as a simple scanning line. Attention is presently given to the technical problems posed by mosaic starer arrays.