AAWSAP DIRD, Detection and High-Resolution Tracking of Vehicles at Hypersonic Velocities, November 2010

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.

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Figures
Figure 1. Boundary Layer Development in Subsonic Flow about a Projectile ........................ 4
Figure 2. Subsonic Flow Past a Projectile ....................................................................... 5
Figure 3. Strauhal Frequency as a Function of Reynolds Number for Flow over a
Circular Cylinder .. .............. ............................ .. ...................................... ....... 6
Figure 4. Supersonic Flow Past a Wedge-Shaped Body .................................................... 8
Figure 5. Supersonic Flow Past a Blunt Body (Spheroid) .................................................. 8
Figure 6. Ratios of Mach Number, Temperature, and Pressure Across a Normal Shock .... ... 10
Figure 7. Hypersonic Vehicle Detection Techniques ....................................................... 11
Figure 8. Laser-Based Chronograph ... ......... ............. ....................... ............................ 12
Figure 9. Electromagnetic Spectrum as a Function of Wavelength ................................... 13
Figure 10. Schematic of a RADAR System ................................................................... 14
Figure 11. Radio Reflection Detector................ .. ......................................................... 16
Figure 12. Energy Spectrum of t he Sun at 5,778 K....................................................... 19
Figure 13. Hypersonic Flow Past a Sphere... ................................................................ 20
Figure 14. Infrared Energy Spectra for Mach 3 and Mach 3.5 ......... ................................ 21
Figure 15. Peak Wavelength of the Infrared Radiation Emitted by Hypersonic Objects ........ 22
Figure 16. Peak Shock Layer Temperature for Hypersonic Objects .................................. 22
Figure 17. Schematic of a Pulsed LIDAR System ........................................................... 24
Figure 18. Mach Cone Generated by a Supersonic Object .............................................. 26
Figure 19. Comparison of Detection Technology for Hypersonic Objects ........................... 32
Tables
Table 1: Normal Shock Values for Mach 3 Flow ...............................................................9
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