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By Lee Ferran | ABC News – 10 hrs ago
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Super Secret Hypersonic Aircraft …
It turns out that tearing through the
atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound is bad for the skin, even if you're a
super high-tech aircraft developed by the government's best engineers at its
far-out research agency.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency,
has made public its best
guess about what might have caused its unmanned arrowhead-shaped Hypersonic Technology
Vehicle (HTV-2) to suddenly
lose contact and crash in the Pacific just a few minutes after slicing
through the sky at Mach 20 last August: it was going so fast its skin peeled
off.
After an eight-month investigation, DARPA
concluded that even though the HTV-2 was expected to lose some of its skin
mid-flight, "larger than anticipated portions of the vehicle's skin peeled from
the aerostructure," the agency said in a
statement Friday.
The agency said it expected the HTV-2,
which goes so fast it can make the commute from New York to Los Angeles in 12
minutes, to experience "impulsive shock waves" at such speeds, but shocks it
experienced last August were "more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed
to withstand."
While the test was very public, the details
of the HTV-2's design, stability system and potential purpose remain highly
classified.
Two months after DARPA's test, the Army
tested its own hypersonic
aircraft - this one a long-range
weapon system called the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW) designed to strike
any target in the world in just a couple hours.
From N.Y. to L.A. in 12 mins.
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