A
Rocket plume refers to the
cone of hot
exhaust gases produced by the
burning and burned rocket
propellant. Some plumes are huge and very incredible to observe, i.e.
Shuttle launches.
Rocket plumes are studied a lot in the field of boost phase discrimination of ballistic missiles. These plumes produce infrared and radio frequency signatures that are important in target feature extraction for classification. Plumes are very hard to model both analytically and computationally, making them a hot topic for research.