page_title: Geophysical MASINT
section_title: UTAMS
hierarchical_section_title: Geophysical MASINT / Acoustic MASINT / Counterbattery and countersniper location and ranging / Modern acoustic artillery locators / UTAMS
caption_attribution_description: UTAMS acoustic tower subcomponent of Rocket Launch Spotter
context_page_description: Geophysical MASINT is a branch of Measurement and Signature Intelligence that involves phenomena transmitted through the earth and manmade structures including emitted or reflected sounds, pressure waves, vibrations, and magnetic field or ionosphere disturbances.
  According to the United States Department of Defense, MASINT is technically derived intelligence that – when collected, processed, and analyzed by dedicated MASINT systems – results in intelligence that detects, tracks, identifies, or describes the signatures of fixed or dynamic target sources. MASINT was recognized as a formal intelligence discipline in 1986. Another way to describe MASINT is a "non-literal" discipline. It feeds on a target's unintended emissive by-products, the "trails" - the spectral, chemical or RF that an object leaves behind. These trails form distinct signatures, which can be exploited as reliable discriminators to characterize specific events or disclose hidden targets."
context_section_description: Another acoustic system is the Unattended Transient Acoustic MASINT Sensor (UTAMS), developed by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, which detects mortar and rocket launches and impacts. UTAMS remains the primary cueing sensor for the Persistent Threat Detection System (PTDS). ARL mounted aerostats with UTAMS,  developing the system in a little over two months. After receiving a direct request from Iraq, ARL merged components from several programs to enable the rapid fielding of this capability.    
  UTAMS has three to five acoustic arrays, each with four microphones, a processor, radio link, power source, and a laptop control computer. UTAMS, which was first operational in Iraq, first tested in November 2004 at a Special Forces Operating Base (SFOB) in Iraq. UTAMS was used in conjunction with AN/TPQ-36 and AN/TPQ-37 counter-artillery radar. While UTAMS was intended principally for detecting indirect artillery fire, Special Forces and their fire support officer learned it could pinpoint improvised explosive device (IED) explosions and small arms/rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fires. It detected Points of Origin (POO) up to 10 kilometers from the sensor.
  Analyzing the UTAMS and radar logs revealed several patterns. The opposing force was firing 60 mm mortars during observed dining hours, presumably since that gave the largest groupings of personnel and the best chance of producing heavy casualties. That would have been obvious from the impact history alone, but these MASINT sensors established a pattern of the enemy firing locations.
  This allowed the US forces to move mortars into range of the firing positions, give coordinates to cannon when the mortars were otherwise committed, and to use attack helicopters as a backup to both. The opponents changed to night fires, which, again, were countered with mortar, artillery, and helicopter fires. They then moved into an urban area where US artillery was not allowed to fire, but a combination of PSYOPS leaflet drops and deliberate near misses convinced the locals not to give sanctuary to the mortar crews.
  Originally for a Marine requirement in Afghanistan, UTAMS was combined with electro-optical MASINT to produce the Rocket Launch Spotter (RLS) system useful against both rockets and mortars.
  In the Rocket Launch Spotter (RLS) application, each array consists of four microphones and processing equipment. Analyzing the time delays between an acoustic wavefront’s interaction with each microphone in the array UTAMS provides an azimuth of origin. The azimuth from each tower is reported to the UTAMS processor at the control station, and a POO is triangulated and displayed. The UTAMS subsystem can also detect and locate the point of impact (POI), but, due to the difference between the speeds of sound and light, it may take UTAMS as long as 30 seconds to determine the POO for a rocket launch 13 km away. In this application, the electro-optical component of RLS will detect the rocket POO earlier, while UTAMS may do better with the mortar prediction.
caption: Tower-mounted UTAMS array component of UTAMS in the Rocket Launch Spotter (RLS) system
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