WORLD'S FASTEST JET

NASA X - 43

 

NASA X-43 is the fastest jet in the world. NASA X-43 was an experimental unmanned hypersonic aircraft with multiple planned scale variations meant to test various aspects of hypersonic flight. It was the part of X-plane series and specifically of NASA's Hyper-X program. The X-43 set several airspeed records for jet aircraft. It is the fastest aircraft on record at approximately Mach 9.6.

A winged booster rocket with the X-43 placed on top, known as "stack", was drop launched from a Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. After the booster rocket brought the stack to the target speed and the altitude, it was discarded, and NASA X-43 flew free using its own engine, a scramjet.

The first plane in the series, NASA X-43A, was a single-use vehicle. Only three of them were built. The first was destroyed after malfunctioning in the flight; the other two flew successfully, with the scramjet operating for approximately 10 seconds, followed by a 10-minute glide and intentional crash into the ocean.

 

NASA X-43A aircraft was a small unpiloted test vehicle measuring just over 12 ft (3.7 m) in length. The vehicle was a lifting body design, where the body of the aircraft provide a significant amount of lift for the flight, rather than relying on wings. The NASA aircraft weighed roughly 3,000 lb (1,400 kg). NASA X-43A was designed to be fully controllable in high-speed flight, even when gliding without propulsion. However, the NASA aircraft was not designed to land and be recovered. Test vehicles crashed into the Pacific Ocean after the test was over.

Traveling at Mach speeds produce the lot of heat due to the compression shock waves involved in the supersonic aerodynamic drag. At high Mach speeds, heat can become so intense that the metal portions of the airframe could melt. NASA X-43A compensated for this by cycling water behind the engine cowl and sidewall leading edges, cooling those surfaces. In the tests, the water circulation was activated at about Mach 3.

The craft was created to develop and test a supersonic-combustion ramjet, or "scramjet" engine, an engine variation where external combustion takes place within air that is flowing at the supersonic speeds. NASA X-43A's developers designed the aircraft's airframe to be part of the propulsion system: the forebody is a part of the intake airflow, while the aft section functions as an exhaust nozzle.

The engine of NASA X-43A was primarily fueled with hydrogen fuel. In the successful test, about two pounds ( 1 kg ) of the fuel was used. Unlike rockets, the scramjet-powered vehicles do not carry oxygen on board for fueling the engine. Removing the need to carry the oxygen significantly reduces the vehicle's size and weight. In the future, such lighter vehicles could take the heavier payloads into space or carry payloads of the same weight much more efficiently.

Scramjets only operate at speeds in the range of Mach 4.5 or higher, so the rockets or other jet engines are required to initially boost scramjet-powered aircraft to this base velocity. In the case of NASA X-43A, the aircraft was accelerated to high speed with a Pegasus rocket launched from a converted Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bomber. The combined NASA X-43A and Pegasus vehicle was referred to as the "stack" by the program's team members.

The engines in NASA X-43A test vehicles were specifically designed for a certain speed range, only able to compress and ignite the fuel-air mixture when the incoming airflow is moving as expected. The first two NASA X-43A aircraft were intended for flight at approximately Mach 7, while the third was designed to operate at speeds greater than Mach 9.8 at altitudes of 98,000 ft (30,000 m) or more.

by - FROZEN FOUR GAMING