Massive radar could track baseball from across a continent

It looks a little like the Death Star, but without the planet-destroying laser or, one hopes, overly vulnerable thermal exhaust port.

But the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s Boeing-built Sea-Based X-band Radar (pdf), which pulled into Seattle late Tuesday, can track tiny objects from across a continent and send targeting information to a laser.

“You could put the SBX in the Chessapeake Bay and it could track something the size of a baseball hit outside here from Safeco Field, provided it could get over the curvature of the earth,” Army Col. Mark Arn, the Missile Defense Agency’s project manager for the X-band sensors, said Wednesday.

Read more