Perfecting Space-Time Adaptive Processing - The Mountaintop Legacy

Kenneth D. Senne
Lincoln Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 

When it first became technologically feasible to implement Space-Time Adaptive Processing for suppression of clutter and jamming in airborne radars, DARPA created a technology development program to provide focus for testing the proposed techniques. The Mountaintop Program provided an inexpensive but realistic emulation of land and sea clutter as viewed from an airborne surveillance platform.  In this talk we will review the process by which the Mountaintop Program brought focus and collaboration within the radar signal processing community. The presentation is dedicated to the visionary sponsorship of Ryan Henry of DARPA/STO, who inspired the creative use of Mountaintop, the ASAP Workshop, and the broad support of the technical community to provide a fertile environment to aid in the pursuit of reducing STAP from theory to practice.