AQS-20 Through-the-Sensor (TTS) performance assessment

Performance of existing and planned mine hunting sensors is dependent on the environment. When the sea floor is a flat smooth hard sandy surface with no mine like clutter on it, then sensor performance is outstanding and acoustic mine hunting is relatively easy. Introduce clutter, a rough seafloor and a soft muddy bottom, sensor performance is seriously degraded making mine hunting operations extremely difficult to impossible. One must know the environment to know sensor performance. Historical environmental data is important but not sufficient. In spite of painstaking efforts to collect, process and disseminate data, historical information is often missing, outdated or in error. To know sensor performance, near realtime environmental data must be collected to verify, supplement and refresh historical holdings. This paper describes the results of two near real-time end-to-end Through-the-Sensor (TTS) demonstrations conducted in FY05 using AQS-20 data. Critical environmental parameters were extracted from the raw tactical data stream using a TTS approach. Data collected by the AQS-20 was processed for bathymetry, sediment type and % burial. Supplemental data was fused with historical information on scene and used to calculate doctrinal bottom type in NAVOCEANO's Bottom Mapping Workstation. The information was passed to MEDAL where track spacing and hunt times were calculated. NAVOCEANO, in a fast reach back mode using TEDServices, examined the data, added value, and returned it. The impact to the mine warfare community is a true sense of sensor performance.