Airborne Aero-Optical Laboratory - Transonic

This report covers the first and second year of this ONR grant, but it is the fourth and fifth years of the Airborne Aero-Optics Laboratory-Transonic AAOL-T program, whose first three years were under an AFOSR grant. Aero-optics severely limits an airborne directed-energy systems lethal field of regard aero-optics refers to the deleterious effect that the density fluctuations in the flow have on an airborne optical system. The AAOL-T program studies aero-optical aberration problems from experimental, theoretical and computational approaches the most unique part of the program is that we also perform flight tests using Falcon 10s, capable of testing at greater than Mach 0.8. The program makes use of two aircraft, one to project a small aperture, diverging beam toward an optical turret on the second, laboratory aircraft. The fourth and fifth years of the program have been productive with flights in support of both the baseline program and to support AFRLDARPA 40 ABC Turret testing. During the baseline program, extensive measurements of aero-optical environment around both hemisphere-on-cylinder and hemisphere-only turrets were performed for Mach range between 0.5 and 0.8.