A Rainfield Simulator for Hypersonic Testing

The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Technical Center's Aerophysics Research Facility, (ARF), fired a successful hypersonic shot to test its new rainfield simulator.

U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Technical Center, Huntsville, AL

Zack Perrin, ARF manager and technical lead engineer of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (USASMDC's) Targets and Test Resources Branch of the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, said ARF is SMDC's premier hypersonic flight and hypervelocity impact laboratory. Perrin said their largest gun system, the 254 mm light gas guns, or LGGs, is the fastest gun in the Army and can launch projectiles 6 inches in diameter to speeds up to 3 kilometers per second or smaller projectiles on the order of 2.7 inches in diameter to velocities exceeding 6 km/s.

“I like to tell people that the facility is a gun range the size of an aircraft carrier and within the facility are multiple engineering tools, called light gas guns,” Perrin said. “Aerophysics' core mission is to efficiently and affordably provide both the Army and the broader Department of Defense (DoD) engineering community with state-of-the-art hypersonic aerodynamic data, hypervelocity impact physics data, and weapons system performance data.”