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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office in fiscal year 2010 as part of the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications program. It reviews how air flows around objects at subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic speeds, covering shock waves, wakes and ionization. It then compares ways to detect and track hypersonic vehicles, including radar, optical, infrared, LIDAR, infrasound and seismic methods. The report makes four recommendations, among them building a database of aircraft wake signatures and developing novel detectors.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 11/20/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD surveys how hypersonic vehicles may be detected and tracked by exploiting the physical effects they create in flight, especially shock waves, ionized gas, hot surfaces, and turbulent atmospheric wakes. The report reviews a broad set of detection methods, including radar, infrared sensing, optical imaging, LIDAR, passive radio reflection, infrasound, and seismic techniques, and argues that the most effective systems will likely combine multiple sensor types, because each captures different features of a high-speed vehicle’s passage through the atmosphere. It presents radar and infrared sensing as the strongest existing tools for operational detection, while giving particular attention to wake-based methods such as LIDAR and passive radio techniques for improving tracking, identification, and discrimination of future hypersonic aircraft. The paper identifies hypersonic vehicles as an evolving surveillance problem in which future progress will depend on better multi-sensor integration, improved wake characterization, and novel signature-exploitation techniques.
UNCLASSIFIED/fFOR. QFFIEl.t.L: Uii QD:I! X Storage Oscillo ~ l : scope ~--- --~: Photodetectors Hypersonic Aircraft c===- ''''' '''' Test Range llL: .. 111: ~Laser / 1 lit D Velocity= L/llt ~~~ams /~ Lasers Figure 8. Laser-Based Chronograph. Currently, the best devices for the detection of hypersonic vehicles are based on the reflection of radio and microwave radiation through RADAR and upon the detection of infrared energy emitted by the ionized gases surrounding high-speed vehicles and in their wake. Optical and RADAR methods are also based on electromagnetic energy, yet make use of different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum as shown in Figure 9. Longer wavelength photons, or quanta of electromagnetic energy, have less energy than short wavelength photons. As a result, detection of short wavelength radiation tends to be more line-of-sight as in infrared or other optical methods. Longer wavelengths, used in RADAR, tend to bend around the Earth and can provide over-the-horizon detection of ICBMs, reentry vehicles, and other hyperson ic vehicles. UNCLASSIFIED//EQA: QlililEl.t.L: W&&: O,.L'l 12
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 46 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.