Waveguide Augmented Radiometric System (WARS)

Flight Loads Lab engineers have been making temperature measurements (surface mounted and radiometric) in ground test and flight test applications for 50+ years. Flight vehicles often rely on thermocouples and RTDs for temperature measurements, and often lose data prior to the sensor limit due to failure of the attachment method. This is a well-known problem. The highest temperature thermocouples (Type C) are made from a tungsten alloy that is very brittle, and therefore thermocouple failures often happen due to the lead wires breaking. The second-highest temperature thermocouple is based on platinum-rhodium alloys that are very expensive, and still have the attachment method limitation. Thermocouple plugs get around the surface attachment limitation by embedded TCs in plugs of the host material. However, this increases cost, schedule, and risk due to the fabrication of an inclusion into the host structure, and is therefore always in limited quantity. Radiometric measurement methods have been flown numerous times (FIRE, Apollo, Shuttle, MSL, EFT-1, AHW) but always with low quantities per ship due to difficulty of implementation stemming from line-of-sight requirement, system size and expense.

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