The U.S. Army Wants to Know Where Enemy Bullets Are Coming From
Traveling at supersonic speeds, a bullet exiting a gun barrel generates acoustic “shock waves” propagating through the air from the tip of the projectile, producing a sound “signature” which can be detected by specially engineered sensors, according to Raytheon BBN engineers.
This technical process, simply put, saves lives as it enables soldiers to instantly know the exact location of incoming enemy small arms fire, offering an opportunity for a precise and lethal counterattack amid high-intensity combat. A technology which does this, made by a Raytheon subsidiary called BBN, already exists and has been deployed with U.S. Army soldiers. It’s called Boomerang, and a set of six different sensors can instantly find the source of incoming bullets from moving vehicles and stationary locations.
“The way a shock wave works is it generates and propagates at the speed of sound. While the bullet is moving, a stream of waves comes off the tip of the bullet that propagates through the air. From six sensors I can locate exactly where it came from,” Brad Tousley, President at Raytheon BBN, told Warrior in an interview.
Now part of Raytheon, Boomerang-maker BBN began with innovative ideas from three MIT professors who envisioned a way to engineer these kinds of advanced acoustics years ago.
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