NASA's first air-to-air images of supersonic shockwave interaction in flight: Watch

NASA on Tuesday released the never-before-seen air-to-air photos of the Supersonic shockwave interactions between the two flights. The images were processed by NASA’s Physical Scientist J.T. Heineck who works at the Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. It took Heineck more than 10 years of technology development to finally unveil what he described as “a milestone” for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.

Taking to its official Instagram handle, the space agency on June 29 shared a series of colourful images that depicted the shockwaves heard on the ground as a sonic boom when the planes fly, visually. “ With exceptional clarity, NASA Aero captured the flow of these shock waves from supersonic aircraft in 2019, and for the first time, the interaction of the shocks in flight,” the space agency explained in the caption. 

Interestingly, the images were monochromatic at first. NASA transformed them to the colorised composites, stating, “We never dreamt that it would be this clear, this beautiful.” Meanwhile, Heineck said that he had never imagined that the rare imagery would look so stunning.

“I am ecstatic about how these images turned out,” NASA’s physical scientist said, adding that with the help of the agency’s upgraded system, the team, by an order of magnitude, “improved both the speed and quality of the imagery from previous research.” 

The supersonic shockwave images were developed by NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center and Ames Research Center in collaboration using the Air-to-Air Background Oriented Schlieren with Simultaneous Referencing (AirBOS-SR) approach that allows the real-time adjustments on multiple frames from various angles. This method employs a slow-moving observer airplane equipped with high-speed digital cameras that fly looking down at a landscape that has “visual texture” from a height. The camera hovers to record the landscape as it waits for the supersonic aircraft to pass through the cameras’ fields-of –view. 

“We’re looking at a supersonic flow, which is why we’re getting these shockwaves,” said Neal Smith, a research engineer with AerospaceComputing Inc. at NASA Ames’ fluid mechanic's laboratory.

“What’s interesting is, if you look at the rear T-38, you see these shocks kind of interact in a curve,” he said. “This is because the trailing T-38 is flying in the wake of the leading aircraft, so the shocks are going to be shaped differently. This data is really going to help us advance our understanding of how these shocks interact.”

Images captured at US Air Force Test Pilot School

NASA’s images feature pair of T-38s from the US Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, flying in formation at supersonic speeds at approximately 30 feet away from each other. The second aircraft is trailing 10 feet lower than the leading T-38. Previously NASA had conducted research on distortion shocks of the Ames’ wind tunnel via subscale schlieren technique that led to the expansion of this research to full-scale flight testing.