Airborne Supersonic Platform for Testing Advanced Wavefront Sensors for Hypersonic and Ballistic Missiles Tracking and Interception

To aid in the development of supersonic interceptors and ballistics weapons, the Laser Division at Kirtland AFB, NM, has a national mission for defense and countermeasures using directed energy, especially the Airborne Laser (ABL) program designed to destroy attacking ballistic missiles and the development of the Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL), and also in the implementation of beam control methods to improve laser quality for targeting and to improve light collection for high-resolution imaging and sensing. AEDC, MD, has a national defense-related mission tasked with the development of hypersonic weapons and interceptors, and they are at the forefront of aero-optical testing and evaluation in hypersonic environments. To address directed energy applications in supersonic and hypersonic flight regimes, the proposed effort focuses on combining flight experimentation capability with ultrahigh-speed wavefront sensing to deliver a supersonic airborne platform that can serve as a reliable and low-cost way of obtaining time- and spatially- resolved wavefront measurements that can be obtained throughout the flight profile of the aircraft. The platform will also serve as a flight test bed for testing advanced wavefront sensing technologies. To achieve this, we will build a compact, portable ultrahigh-speed wavefront sensor that can be integrated into a supersonic aircraft and this sensor will be validated using wind tunnel experiments in supersonic and hypersonic flows consisting of boundary layers, shock layers, and shear layers – both separated and attached. The deliverable sensor will be a versatile, state of the art wavefront sensor that provides the most powerful capabilities for flow diagnostics and aero-optics in existence. The system specifications and the sensing characteristics, such as the fields of view and measurement resolutions in space, time and phase, will be provided. The research effort will provide a pathway towards an airborne platform for real-time wavefront measurements in flight and further is expected to provide high-fidelity wavefront measurements in supersonic and hypersonic flows with high spatial resolution in an ultrafast manner, thereby providing the potential for the deployment of the sensor in a feedback loop to perform corrections to the wavefront distortions using adaptive optics. Further, the aero-optical quantities obtained from these experiments will provide a valuable data set to understand these flows and to serve as a benchmark for validating prediction tools that are used in the design of laser-based guidance and interception of supersonic and hypersonic flight vehicles.