Characterization and Incorporation of Vernier Engines within the Plume Modeling Process

Plume signature phenomenology plays an increasingly important role in the development of a wide variety of missile defense technologies, both at the tactical and strategic levels. With the emergence of recent threats, plume signature phenomenology is increasingly central to Missile Defense Agency"s fundamental mission of development of a Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). The Missile Defense Agency"s modeling and simulation directorate is developing, updating, improving, and validating end-to-end modeling and simulation capabilities for the entire missile fly-out scenarios. As part of this broad objective, the simulation of the effects of vernier engines plumes for liquid propulsion systems on sensor systems has a great potential to enhance our defensive capabilities. The opportunity for MDA presented by this effort is to significantly improve flowfield-modeling approaches to better support testing of advanced BMDS sensing systems within high-level simulation environments. This effort will work out the details to correctly represent vernier interactions within plume flowfields and to provide an efficient mechanism to support incorporating these representations into the FLITES scene generation framework.