By Master Sgt. Ty Foster 30th Space Wing Public Affairs

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – An unarmed modified Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missile carrying a mock warhead and decoys launched from here Oct. 14.

[Photo: The launch of the Minuteman II mock warhead. Photo by Diana Helgesen, Sandia National Laboratories]

The launch was part of an on-going series of Missile Defense Agency developmental flight tests of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense test program, according to Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, MDA spokesman.

About 20 minutes after the target missile was launched from here, a Ground-Based Interceptor carrying a prototype exoatmospheric kill vehicle launched from the Ronald Reagan Missile Test Facility at Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands about 4,800 miles away.

The EKV intercept of the target took place about 10 minutes later at an altitude of approximately 140 miles above the central Pacific Ocean during the midcourse phase of the target warhead’s flight.

This was an integrated system test combining space-based missile warning sensors, ground-based early warning radar, the prototype X-Band radar at Kwajalein Atoll and the GMD battle management, command, control and communications system located at Kwajalein Atoll and the Joint National Integration Facility in Colorado Springs, Colo.

“Since the system is in its research and development phase, these elements serve as either prototypes or surrogates for system elements which are in the developmental stage and have not yet been produced for actual operational use,” Lehner said.

The U.S. Navy Aegis destroyer, the USS John Paul Jones, participated in the test, using its SPY-1 radar to gather data about the target and interceptor missiles.

This is the first time an Aegis radar is participating in a GMD flight test.

This is the seventh intercept test of the GMD element, formerly National Missile Defense, research and development program.

In the six tests evaluating the EKV’s hit-to-kill technology, there have been four successful intercepts.