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At some point in the next few weeks, a B-52H bomber will carry a missile high into the air and launch it at unprecedented speed towards its target, according to the U.S. Air Force. If all goes according to plan, this missile will accelerate to more than five times the speed of sound before deploying a dummy second stage that will quickly “disintegrate” somewhere in the atmosphere.
The missile, known as the AGM-183A, is said to be the first hypersonic weapon – or air-launched rapid reaction (ARRW) weapon – in the U.S. arsenal. It should move so quickly through the atmosphere – about 20 times the speed of sound – at altitudes so low that it is impossible for enemy missile defense systems to fire out of the air. And its speed means it can be useful for destroying “high-value, time-sensitive targets,” according to the Air Force. said in a press release.
Hypersonic missile designs, including this one, typically involve two stages.
First, a rocket accelerates the weapon to several times the speed of sound, while remaining at a much lower altitude than intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) which are above the atmosphere before delivering their nuclear charges.
Second, it unleashes a glider that carries the weapon for the final leg of its journey to the target, riding the atmosphere like a surfer swinging and slithering over waves – adding another wrinkle to any attempt to bring it down. .
This lower altitude, in theory, makes a hypersonic weapon harder to detect and harder to destroy: it is harder to detect for the same reason that it is more difficult to see an aircraft when you are standing on the ground in a airport 5 miles away that a plane 10 miles away in flight approaches this airport to land; the closer an object is to the ground, the more things – from trees to buildings to another plane – get in the way. And a hypersonic missile is theoretically more difficult to shoot down for more or less the same reason; most missile defense technologies are designed to intercept an ICBM near the top of its arc through space. Up there, a missile defense system has a clearer line of sight to the target, and the ICBM itself moves more predictably.
A Mach 20 hypersonic glider would in fact travel at about the same speed as a decades-old ICBM, which can accelerate to similar speeds during space travel, but must cover a much longer distance to reach. the same target. (That’s the difference between driving a straight line from New York to San Francisco and driving between the two cities with a stopover in the Arctic Circle.)
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The United States is not the only country working on hypersonic weapon technology. As Previously reported Live ScienceRussian President Vladimir Putin first announced his country’s hypersonic weapons program in 2018, promising that the country’s hypersonic weapon would reach Mach 20.
Pavel Podvig, a military analyst, told Live Science at the time that such weapons are unlikely to be useful.
“It has been described as a weapon in search of a mission,” he said. “I think you don’t really need that type of ability. It doesn’t really change much in terms of your ability to hit targets.”
This is because ICBMs are already perfectly capable of evading missile defense systems. The United States has the most advanced missile defense technology in the world; and according to Laura Grego, physicist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and many other analysts, it just doesn’t work. It is therefore not known why a hypersonic missile would be needed to strike another country. The Air Force insists that an ARRW could be useful against “time sensitive” targets, due to its high speed (at least compared to the non-ICBM missiles typically used to deliver weapons. non-nuclear).
The danger with hypersonic weapons, Podvig said, is that they are not covered by existing treaties designed to prevent arms races.
And there is still a lot of uncertainty around the technology. “These systems create greater risks of [strategic] miscalculation, ”Podvig said,“ and it is not clear whether we can effectively manage these risks. “
Meanwhile, there are questions about how hypersonic technology works.
The upcoming test will only demonstrate the missile itself, not the glider, which is the most advanced technology. (Rockets that go very fast have been around for a long time. Gliders that fly several times faster than an F-16 haven’t been.) And, as pointed out by The Drive, this test was also delayed. The missile arrived at Edwards Air Force Base in California on March 1, and the service initially announced that the test would take place before March 6. Then, the March 5 statement extended that deadline to the “next 30 days” without explanation.
Meanwhile, an independent analysis published in 2020 in the journal Science and Global Security argued that “fundamental physics” places strict limits on the usefulness of these weapons. They showed that the physics of atmospheric flight prevent these weapons from going fast enough to go far beyond ICBMs, and that it would be relatively easy to detect a hypersonic missile launch with the right satellite. The idea that hypersonic missiles would offer a revolutionary upgrade over ICBMs, the researchers argued, is a “social” phenomenon, not a scientific one.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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