Technology to Pinpoint Sniper Fire
Oct. 18 -- Military researchers have been experimenting with counter-sniper systems designed to help soldiers spot a hidden assassin.
The military has long understood the dangers of enemy snipers — especially those lurking in urban settings. In places like Sarajevo, sharp-shooting gunmen hidden among the city's buildings and rubble claimed many lives during the Bosnian conflict.
And starting around 1993, the Defense Advances Research Projects Agency (DARPA) began work on a way to find these lethal predators.
By far, such systems rely on sensors that track the sniper's trademark calling card: the snap and flash of a high-speed rifle bullet in flight.
One prototype system developed by BNN Technologies, a division of telecommunications company Verizon, uses a network of inexpensive microphones, portable computers and compasses connected to a central processing station.
Each audio sensor can be mounted on a soldier's helmet, a vehicle, or lamppost and is tuned and is tuned to detect the "crack" — actually a tiny sonic boom — of a rifle shot. When two or more sensors pick up those acoustic vibrations, location and time data from each sensor is sent back to the central processing station.
A computer there coordinates the data and mathematically determines the trajectory, distance, speed and elevation of the bullet. Following the bullet's flight path backwards thus reveal the location of the shooter.
Another system developed by the Maryland Advanced Development Laboratory in Greenbelt, Md., tracks bullets in a different manner.
Instead of audio sensors, the Viper Counter Sniper System uses an infra-red video camera that can be mounted on aircraft — including unmanned robot planes. As the aircraft circles over a given area, the camera detects the invisible infra-red light and heat signals that are generated from the muzzle of a fired rifle. Once such a muzzle blast is picked up, the system notes the shooter's location using Global Positioning Satellite signals and beams the information down to nearby troopers.
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