Following the success of the Hyper-X project, conclusion of the X-43 Program, and the retirement of the NASA B-52 (The Boeing Company, Chicago, Illinois) airplane, tail number 008, researchers at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center began to look for another research test vehicle, or testbed, for the hypersonic flight regime. A new hypersonic testbed would have to be low cost to survive in the financial environment of shrinking aeronautics funding within NASA. A low-cost approach to develop a hypersonic testbed was found in a surplus of U.S. Navy Phoenix (Raytheon Company, Waltham, Massachusetts) air-to-air missiles in combination with the NASA F-15B (McDonnell Douglas Corporation, St. Louis, Missouri) airplane, tail number 836. Currently, the only other option for hypersonic flight-testing is through the use of sounding rockets that are unguided and limited in their trajectory variability. Also, sounding rockets cannot be used to verify control system algorithms because they lack a guidance system. As shown in figure 1, the F-15B airplane will be used to carry the missiles to supersonic conditions for launch. The missiles would then be launched, carrying experimental research payloads to their test conditions at speeds in excess of Mach 5. This effort is being performed with the assistance of the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division (NAWC-WD) at China Lake, California.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Design of the Phoenix Missile Hypersonic Testbed (PMHT)


    Contributors:
    T. P. Jones (author)

    Publication date :

    2007


    Size :

    3 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English






    The Pedestrian PMHT

    Efe, M. / Willett, P. / International Society of Information Fusion et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2002


    The turbo PMHT

    Yanhua Ruan, / Willett, P. | IEEE | 2004


    The pedestrian PMHT

    Efe, M. / Ruan, Y. / Willett, P. | IEEE | 2002