Chinese scientists work on hypersonic missile that can hit moving car
- Researchers say their breakthroughs will achieve split second pinpoint accuracy over long distances
- ‘Important progress’ has been made towards 2025 deadline to come up with solutions to the missile technology’s challenges
The research team, led by Yang Xiaogang from the PLA Rocket Force University of Engineering in Xian, said “important progress” had been made towards solving the main problem of how to pinpoint a moving target at extreme speeds.
Yang and his colleagues from the university’s College of Missile Engineering have been given a deadline of 2025 to come up with solutions to the seemingly intractable challenges of hypersonic technology.
Because a superfast missile can travel long distances in a split second, a tiny error in the positioning and guidance system can lead to a huge miss, they explained in a paper published in Chinese peer-reviewed journal Infrared and Laser Engineering.
Over distance, the infrared signature of a small moving target “constitutes just a few pixels without detailed information such as shape, texture and structure”, making identification and tracking “extremely difficult”, they said.
The heat sensor needs an extremely cold environment, but the surface temperature of the missile can reach several thousand degrees Celsius, producing a huge amount of background noise.