Chaff has always been a short term phenomenon - it settles, so how do you make it neutrally dense or even lighter than air so it will not settle.
The key is related to the aluminum coated Mylar balloons - make them as light as air, Helium diffuses out quickly
but if you use hydrogen you can create a chaff machine that uses two sheets of plastic, one coated with very thin aluminum. trap helium or hydrogen between them, then laminate and separate them into tiny tubes with neutral density so the residence time in air is quite a few hours with Hydrogen, lots less with helium. You can make it in advance, but popped popcorn fills a plane quickly, but unpopped corn allows you to mobilize more chaff in the plane.
This would be a good method to fox radar guided missiles, or radar satellite surveys or launches. These short straws of Mylar would have the needed aerial residence time and could even be made to rise, loiter and then fall with the right choice of gasses (mixed hydrogen and helium allows a rise, followed by a fall as the helium diffuses out) - saves helium as well
Interesting. I was looking at radar with my co-worker yesterday, we saw these scans and were like WTF is going on? Chaff from a C-130 huh? They do some interesting stuff with those planes. I worked on a project where we flew C-130 thru clouds, took pictures of the clouds and did data analysis etc.<p>Spent an entire summer analyzing pictures of ice crystals like this [1] in MATLAB. Fun times...<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eol.ucar.edu/instruments/two-dimensional-optical-array-cloud-probe" rel="nofollow">https://www.eol.ucar.edu/instruments/two-dimensional-optical...</a>
They issued an update today with quotes from the West Virginia Air National Guard:<p><a href="http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25451/a-west-virginia-air-guard-c-130h-was-responsible-for-massive-chaff-cloud-over-midwest" rel="nofollow">http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25451/a-west-virginia-a...</a>
I thought of migrating birds, as they sometimes show up on radar, but there does not appear to be anything here[1] corresponding to this event.<p>[1] <a href="http://birdcast.info/live-migration-maps/" rel="nofollow">http://birdcast.info/live-migration-maps/</a><p>Update: I got the date wrong, this would have been Dec 10... Data is missing from 10:40 to 16:10 CT, and the spatial resolution is not high, but the map is showing medium rates of migration in that area at the later time.
Seems like the same people who search for meteorites could get a general location for where this went off radar and go walk around. Other than actual chaff, my mind goes to possible “black projects” when reading things like this. I can’t think of any possible applications though.
"<i>The Red Hills MOA is relatively large, including areas of both Illinois and Indiana. We don't know if the MOA was active at the time the plume appeared on radar, but it might help explain the incident.</i>"<p>The military releases "notices to airmen" (NOTAMs?) indicating when a MOA is in use, no?
I wonder if they will be able to put AI into missiles to detect Infrared decoys (flares, IR laser) or radar countermeasures (chaff, jamming).<p>Military countermeasures are really cool, if you can get past the whole moral dilemmas in working with technology like that.
You do realize we're in the middle of a fairly intense meteor storm, where lots of sand sized particles are turned to plasma when they hit the atmosphere, right?<p>It was even today's Google Doodle.
If the chaff had maximum surface area-to-weight ratio approaching spiders ballooning, <2.5 um dust particles and dandelion seeds, and there were
enough thermals upwelling air in the area, it's entirely possible for chaff to persist as long as there is an average slight updraft gradient to periodically relift material.<p>Granted, it's of limited military value unless it were dumped in large quantities (such as an/several E- prefixed US mil aircraft flying air defense suppression/Wild Weasel) and such upwelling wind conditions were present. It's usually intended to create false echoes to misdirect a missile or break a radar lock in real-time with a starting velocity similar to the original aircraft, and then it has no purpose once it separates far from the launching aircraft.
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