The image was recorded over the Mojave Desert

Aug 26, 2015 19:41 GMT  ·  By
Aircraft flying faster than the speed of sound produce powerful shock waves
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   Aircraft flying faster than the speed of sound produce powerful shock waves

Shock waves birthed by a supersonic aircraft in flight over the Mojave Desert in the western US come into focus in an image released by scientists over at NASA this Wednesday. Just scroll down to have a look at the uncanny view yourselves.

The supersonic shock waves that take center stage in this image were created by a US Air Force Test Pilot School T-38C aircraft. The view shows the craft and the shock waves from above.

The reason the Mojave Desert is nowhere is sight is because NASA scientists used an image processing software to remove the background, and enhance the shock waves and bring them into focus.

“Researchers used NASA-developed image processing software to remove the desert background, then combined and averaged multiple frames to produce a clear picture of the shock waves,” the space agency writes in the image's description.

“Getting such an image in flight is incredibly difficult because the image is taken from an aircraft flying at regular subsonic speed of an aircraft flying at supersonic speed,” it adds.

So, how does one take pictures of shock waves?

To image the supersonic shock waves that this US Air Force Test Pilot School T-38C aircraft gave rise to while flying over the Mojave Desert, NASA and US Air Force scientists turned to a decades-old photography technique, i.e. schlieren imagery.

The term schlieren is used to describe optical inhomogeneities that can occur in transparent materials and that are not necessarily visible to the naked eye.

Schlieren photography, the brainchild of German physicist August Toepler, comes down to recording such inhomogeneities and using them to map the flow of fluids of varying densities.

Since shock waves involve abrupt and nearly discontinuous disturbances in the temperature, the pressure and the density of a specific medium, they can be studied using schlieren imagery.

As noted, this photography technique is decades-old. Thus, it was in 1864 that August Toepler invented it. These days, NASA and the US Air Force use the technique to visualize and map supersonic flow phenomena around full-scale aircraft in flight.

Image shows supersonic shock waves created by aircraft in flight
Image shows supersonic shock waves created by aircraft in flight

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Aircraft flying faster than the speed of sound produce powerful shock waves
Image shows supersonic shock waves created by aircraft in flight
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