CUBRC provides the US Government and its contractors with critical test results and analysis for the defense of the nation, space exploration, and the advancement of the understanding and modeling of fundamental hypersonic flow physics.

We develop, operate and maintain a family of supersonic and hypersonic ground test facilities, diagnostics and instrumentation, and computational tools and models that has been designated by the US Government as critical test infrastructure.

This designation is due to the unique capabilities of CUBRC’s ground test facilities that serve the government and its contractors to perform testing of large to full-scale flight systems at flight matching altitude and velocity conditions in clean air freestreams. This includes the matching of Mach number, Reynolds number and velocity (pressure, temperature and density) to conditions of interest that vehicles will experience in the sky during flight, as well as employing full-scale replicated flight geometries.

In order to provide results that can be used directly to compare to computational predictions and engineering tools, the Aerosciences team employs well-characterized, state-of-the-art sensors and diagnostics in everyday testing and will actively develop new sensors and diagnostics as the computational capabilities of the nation evolve.