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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 Chapter 4: Vision of Progress Over the Next 30 Years While there are several methods that can be used to sense high-speed supersonic objects, technology changes in aircraft will generate the need for newer detection and tracking techniques. Listed below are five important categories of objects capable of hypersonic speeds. Over the next 30 years, the ability to reliably and accurately detect them will be critical. • Space Debris - Technology is currently available to detect space debris usin g RADAR and cameras. Novel methods using coronographs 28 during daylight have been shown to detect the reflected light from millimeter-size debris particles in orbit, and existing telescopes are capable of detecting meteors that pose a risk to Earth . Space debris reentering the Earth's atmosphere can reach speeds of over 17,000 miles per hour or Mach 23. • Reentry Craft - The highest recorded speed for any manmade vehicle was the Apollo 10 reentry capsule in 1969. It reached a velocity of 24,790 mph, or Mach 36. Reentry veh icles are currently monitored by ground-based telescopes and RADAR and through satellite imagery. • Meteors - The systems used to monitor missiles and satellites based on RADAR and optical devices can currently detect and track meteors entering the Earth's atmosphere. Further development of acoustic and radio detection techniques should be pursued over the next 30 years. • Missiles - The Cold War generated the need for equipment to monitor hostile missile launches, to track their path, and to estimate the location of their targets based on ballistic trajectories. The United States Space Surveillance Network, for example, is composed of a worldwide collection of RADAR, electro-optical detectors, and passive RF devices that can track satell ites, missiles, and aircraft. They maintain an inventory of satellites in Earth orbit and, through the Space Surveillance Telescope program (SST), asteroids and other faint objects in space are detected and tracked. GEODSS (Ground Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance) telescopes monitor space at 3 different locations around the globe with high enough resolution to detect a basketball 20,000 miles from the Earth. Continued vigilance from governments around the world will likely increase the development of technology to detect and track high-speed objects in the atmosphere and in space over the next 30 years with an emphasis on RADAR and optical detection. • Hypersonic Aircraft - Over the next three decades, hypersonic aircraft development will likely spur an increased need for new technology to detect their presence. While the X-15 rocket plane exceeded Mach 6 (4,520 mph) as early as 1967, continued development of high-speed aircraft will continue to meet needs in the following areas: o SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit) - Long the dream of NASA and space exploration enthusiasts, technology has been under development to replace the Space Shuttle using aircraft that can take off from a conventional runway and attain low-Earth orbit. The X-43A scram jet, part of NASA's Hyper X Program and fueled by hydrogen fuel was successfully tested in 2004. This aircraft is capable of 7,000 mph or Mach 9.8 flight. UNCLASSIFIED//EQA: QlililEl.t.L: W&&: O,.L'l 28
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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.