Phenomena

Space Shuttle Sonic Booms

The Space Shuttle had a famous double sonic boom when passing overhead during re-entry. This schlieren flow visualization of a model shuttle at Mach 3 reveals the source of the sound: the fore and aft shock waves on the vehicle. The nose of the shuttle generates the strongest shock wave since it is the first part of the vehicle the flow interacts with. This initial shock wave turns the flow outward and around the shuttle. The second boom comes from the back of the shuttle and serves to turn the flow back in to fill the wake behind the shuttle. (The actual shock wave would look a little different than this one because there’s no sting holding the shuttle like there is with the model.) The other major shock wave comes from the shuttle’s wings, but, at least for this Mach number, the wing shock wave merges with the bow shock, making the two indistinguishable. (Image credit: G. Settles, source)

One comment
  1. Noah Edelson

    I bet there is some sort of laminar flow going on there. I would love to see a good viz. I’m thinking like isocontours with very little mixing. I understand sound as expanding spherical sin(x)/x type compression / decompressions that typically erupt from all an entire plane (eg membrane) at once. i have a harder time understanding light as a spherical wave, though I guess that is the case. Most people think a photon as a point, but then how could it go through two slits at the same time, and interfere with itself on the other side? Its spherical.. just like sound. Huygens theorized a model for light propagation that
    claimed that each point on a propagating wavefront (regardless of “shape”) could be
    assumed to be a source of a new spherical wave. The sum of these secondary spherical
    “wavelets” produced the subsequent wavefronts. Huygens’ principle had the glaring
    disadvantage that these secondary spherical wavefronts propagated “backwards” as
    well as forwards. blahblah blaaaah Fresnel. Anyway thanks for the neat site/page.

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