Hey it’s me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I want to talk about something that’s really neat. I’m at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake here in California. I’m in front of a building and there’s an F-18, which is a beautiful bird. This aircraft can be configured for the attack role or for a fighter role and there’s something I want to show you.
Look at this: all the different weapons on the pylons, some bombs over there, and this is a Sidewinder missile. This changed a lot of things in a lot of places; it was one of the first heat-seeking missiles developed here in the 1950s, right here at China Lake.
It has a seeker up front so it can go towards the exhaust of an aircraft, some kind of pivoting fins, and a side-looking proximity sensor. It also has a warhead and a rocket, and look at this: there’s something that looks like a water wheel here. You can see it spins! This is called a rolleron. If you can imagine this aircraft is flying along super fast, you shoot this missile at Mach 2.5 and you want to stabilize it. This is a genius way to get around that. A rolleron gives you a flywheel effect and a gyroscopic effect and it becomes a giant flywheel like a gyroscope. This angular momentum gives you an angular momentum vector, and you can see there’s four of them.
They had to balance it by removing material as it can spin at over 100,000 RPM. You also get a pivot point here so as the missile tries to roll, this thing could try to stay in position and provide some aerodynamic stability passively.
There’s a newer version of the missile, the AIM-9X. It doesn’t have pivoting blades up front, it has a fixed billet, a seeker, a warhead, and a rocket with a brown stripe. I was so excited to find my very own rolleron sidewinder missile fin on the internet! After unboxing it, I was able to see how the fins pivot in the back, which is different from the 9-Mike. This is a model, but it is an indication of thrust vector control. The warhead section is also fascinating; it is an expanding-rod warhead that scissor out once detonated, creating a cutter that is orthogonal to the direction of flight. It’s an amazing design, and I’m excited to see what I can do with it! Thank you to everyone who supports on Patreon.com/SmarterEveryDay - you just bought me some missile parts!