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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.
“Low Earth orbit”4 pages
UNCLASSIFIED/fFOR. QFFIEl.t.L: Uii QD:I! X Detection Method Properties Detected Availability Useful for Detection of: I Distance Velocity Altitude Whole Sky Commercially Existing Expense Meteor Reentry Aircraft I To Target Or Directed Available Network Detection Vehicles Electromagnetic Radar I X X X Both X X Modest X X X Radio Reflection Detection Whole Sky X Low X X I Optical I Sky Cameras, Photographic Whole Sky X X Low X X X Infrared I possi ble Both X Modest X X X Lidar I X X Directed X Medium X X X Chronograph X Directted low I Acoustic and Seismic lnfrasound X X Whole Sky X X low X X X Seismic I X X Whole Sky X Modest X X X I Figure 19. Comparison of Detection Technology for Hypersonic Objects. LIDAR systems provide detailed information on velocity, temperature, particle velocity, and atmospheric composition along the path of the laser beam that can be used to interrogate vehicle wakes and exhaust plumes. Seismic and infrasound systems continuously operate and can provide information on the path followed by a high-speed aircra~ or object by tracking its sonic boom and low-frequency acoustic signature. Finally, optical cameras aimed toward the Earth provide valuable information on hypersonic object tracks by recording their tracks. Aimed toward space, optical cameras are tracking asteroids and other spaceborne objects that may enter the atmosphere as a meteor posing a risk. UNCLASSIFIED//EQA: QlililEl.t.L: W&&: O,.L'l 32
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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.