The Nihka flight was the first demonstration of the ability of the Ultraviolet Plume Instrument (UVPI), carried abroad the LACE (Low-power Atmospheric Compensation Experiment) satellite, to observe missiles in flight above the atmosphere. The UVPI is a small, plume-tracking instrument flown on the Naval Research Laboratory's LACE satellite, which was launched on 14 February 1990. The Nihka was launched from the Wallops Island Launch Facility in Virginia to coincide with a LACE pass. The two cameras of the UVPI were used to observe the Nihka in the ultraviolet. These cameras were a tracker camera, viewing over a relatively wide field and broad spectrum, and a plume camera that has a narrow field of view (0. 180 deg by 0. 135 deg) and can observe sources through any of four filters. A three-stage sounding rocket (called Black Brant X) was used for the test. The third stage, or Nihka, reached 190 km altitude and was successfully detected and tracked by the UVPI from a range of 448 to 463 km. The Nihka plume was successfully tracked for 3.23 seconds; 91 images of plume data (each 1/30th of a second) were acquired by using the first plume-camera filter in the 235 to 350 nm range.... Nihka rocket, LACE (Low-power Atmospheric Compensation Experiment), Ultraviolet plume instrument, Rocket plume imaging, UVPI.
UVPI Imaging from the LACE Satellite: The Nihka Rocket Plume
1993
92 pages
Report
No indication
English
Antimissile Defense Systems , Infrared & Ultraviolet Detection , Rocket exhaust , Ultraviolet equipment , Images , Plumes , Tracking , Altitude , Artificial satellites , Atmospherics , Cameras , Compensation , Filters , Guided missiles , Radiometry , Flight , Low power , Naval research , Sounding rockets , Test and evaluation , LACE(Low Power Atmospheric Compensation) , Antimissile defense , Ultraviolet detection , UVPI(Ultraviolet Plume Instrument) , Nihka rocket , Black brant X
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