Here's how the F-35 fighter could help shoot down a North Korean nuke
By Russel Read
1 Hour Ago The F-35 fighter often gets a pretty bad rap.
It's not exactly undeserved. The F-35 program is exorbitantly expensive... actually, coming in at a hefty $400 billion total, it's the most expensive weapons program ever. It suffered from a litany of problems early on, including an ejection seat that could potentially kill the pilot and a busted radar system that would sometimes need to be turned on and off again to work -- not exactly ideal conditions when soaring past the speed of sound at tens of thousands of feet in the air.
That said, some clever scientists over at Northrop Grumman found an unexpected use for the new fighter: taking down a North Korean ballistic missile. For all the F-35's problems, it does have an impressive new sensor suite that researchers believe could help quickly track missiles, giving missile interceptors like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system and Aegis missile destroyer ships a better chance of knocking them out. Known as the Distributed Aperture System (DAS), the suite essentially allows a pilot to "see through" the plane while tracking targets.
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VIDEO AT LINK
https://www.circa.com/story/2017/12/11/world/f-35-fighter-could-help-shoot-down-north-korea-nuke
