F-39A Shapeshifter?
April 26th, 2002 - 9:51 am
Steve Cole reports some very interesting news coming out of DARPA.
You might have heard of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency before. Back in the ’60s, they studied ways to create a communications network that could survive a nuclear war. The result was ARPANET. It eventually evolved into the Internet.
Now DARPA is looking into Air Force jets that could change shape in flight.
No, really.
I cringe every time I watch Broken Arrow, and they put the plane into “stealth mode.” A plane is either stealthy, or it is not. But maybe not for too much longer.
Check it out.
Cool! Transformers live!
I’ve never seen broken arrow, but going into stealth mode could entail turning off all emitters (radars and radios).
The navy practices emission control. Usually we want people to know we’re out there so we radiate everything. Sometimes we don’t and turn everything off so we can sneak up on them, and sometimes we’ll send a ship out with a “van” on board that has tapes of radio conversations and radar transmissions to make someone think there’s a carrier battle group out there when it’s really just a single ship
Stealth Mode in Broken Arrow was about “active cancellation techniques” along with its IR suppression gear.
The B-2 uses passive stealth measures. They build the plane in a shape that prevents radars from getting return echoes. They use materials that do not reflect energy, they deflect the energy.
In Broken Arrow, they were not simply using passive “design stealth” like the B-2, they were using Active Stealth: a system of computers that spoof the radars of tracking systems, sending out carefully modulated signals that are phase cancelling.
This makes the tracking radar think that there is nothing there, rather than simply deflecting the radar energy away like the B-2 does.
This stuff is decades away, so cringe if you want, but our kids will be describing this stuff as everday measures, and calling us dinosaurs for the lack of it during our day.
The only thing that makes you cringe about Broken Arrow is the “stealth mode” issue? You’re one forgiving movie viewer.
Wait. Did you down a few martinis before viewing?