Tim Jung with the new UXR, the next-generation portable radiometer for missile defense-related applications.
Credit: Jennifer Lauren Lee/NIST
If you’re undergoing a missile attack and that missile is above the atmosphere, the best place to destroy it is while it’s still in space. To do that, you need to be confident that the missile interceptors that you launch from Earth are going to hit their target – a very difficult task.
“They say it's like hitting a bullet with a bullet,” said NIST’s Simon Kaplan. “The missile is this little dot which is very far away against the cold background of space, and the military is trying to find it and hit it at very high speed – many kilometers per second.”
Key parts of this interception equipment are infrared sensors, extremely sensitive heat-detecting devices, in the form of telescopes, that are capable of locating the incoming missile. However, since it’s complicated and expensive to conduct all the necessary tests using real rockets, Kaplan said, contractors test their sensors using special chambers in ground-based laboratories.
Each chamber used by the contractors is about the size of a large closet, and it’s cryogenically cooled and also under vacuum in order to mimic the conditions in space. The chambers include a stand-in for the missile being targeted, too – a tiny warm object called a radiation blackbody, which simulates the heat coming from an approaching missile.
But how can contractors be sure that the chambers themselves are really producing the correct environment for their sensors to test?
For more than 30 years, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been assisting with this task.
The portable instrument NIST scientists bring to customers’ chambers is a ..
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