The international HyShot team, led by the University of Queensland, has yet to analyse data from the flight experiment. Project leader Allan Paull says the team should be able to say whether the experiment was a success by Wednesday.

Ray Stalker, inventor of the free-piston shock tunnels used in scramjet research for 40 years, was not at the Woomera launch but cautions that “it usually takes four or five shots for this sort of experiment to be a success”.

NASA’s scramjet project, the Hyper-X (X-43A), failed in June, when the rocket carrying it malfunctioned. A NASA spokesperson said that X-43A will not get its second chance to fly until the accident is fully investigated.

The aim of the HyShot experiment is to test supersonic combustion in flight for the first time. The University of Queensland scramjet is designed to fly at Mach 7.6, i.e. or 7.6 times the speed of sound.

The scramjet results from the $1.25 million HyShot project, led by the University of Queensland and is due to launch on Thursday 25 October. It will lift off on Terrier-Orion rockets at Woomera, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide.

A second Woomera launch is planned for Tuesday 30 October. This will test a British scramjet engine designed by QinetiQ, formerly part of the UK’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.

Both scramjets are designed to fly at Mach 7.6, i.e. 7.6 times the speed of sound, or about 2.3 kilometres per second. This is a whisker faster than the aborted NASA Hyper-X (X-43A) mission in June, which was to fly at Mach 7 for its first test and Mach 10 for two later tests. Previous supersonic “air-breathing” engines have only reached Mach 5.

“The most immediate application is likely to be a high-speed cruise missile,” says John Erdos, a scramjet expert from GASL Inc in New York state.

And while scramjets could eventually propel planes from Sydney to London in two hours, Erdos says that is “probably for your grandchildren to enjoy”.

Supersonic combustion ramjets – or scramjets – are called air-breathing engines because, like normal jets, they use oxygen from the air to burn their fuel. In the HyShot tests, the fuel is liquid hydrogen.

Unlike normal jets, scramjets have no moving parts. The scramjet moves at supersonic speeds, which “rams” the air into the engine, compressing it without the spinning blades used in ordinary jets. When the compressed air mixes with fuel and combusts, its temperature and pressure jump to much higher values.

Russell Boyce from the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra says the air temperature will be about -50 °C before entering the scramjet, and reach 1700 °C after combustion. Similarly, the pressure will increase to 100 times its initial value of about 0.03 atmospheres. The increased pressure provides the thrust to propel the engine.

Cheap and cheerful

“The HyShot scramjet is not the ‘bees’ knees’ of scramjet designs,” says Boyce, but it is designed to be cheap, simple and easy to test in the lab or in the sky.

HyShot will reach an altitude of over 300 kilometres before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Then, about 35 kilometres above the Earth, the scramjet will kick in and, for five precious seconds, data will be sent to the ground via a radio link.

An onboard computer will also record the data and be ejected with a parachute before the rest crashes into the ground. Susan Anderson from the University of Queensland’s HyShot team says they will collect data throughout the 10-minute flight, “so it’s not imperative that we recover the payload”.

Palaeontologists from the Queensland Museum have just returned from the site. They say that the dinosaur they call “Elliot” is a sauropod, but could be a new type, unique to Australia.

So far, the museum’s Steve Salisbury and his colleagues have found parts of the thighbone, ribs and backbone of the dinosaur, but they say there are more fossils to be found.

Salisbury says: “There are indications that Elliot is similar to previous finds, but we’ve already noticed a few differences”. Size is the most obvious.

Without the tail and neck bones, Salisbury cannot say exactly how big the beast was, but there are enough clues to say it stood about four metres high and was 16 to 21 metres in length.

Salisbury adds that the fossils vertebrae appear similar to existing sauropod finds in Australia and worldwide. “But portions of the femur have a slightly different shape,” he says. “I think we might be dealing with an endemic group of sauropods, rather than what’s found elsewhere in the world.”

Big picture

Sauropods were huge, four-legged herbivores, characterised by their long necks and tails and a relatively small head. The brachiosaurus, diplodocus and apatosaurus were all members of the sauropod family.

“This is much more complete than other sauropods found in Australia,” says Jenni Creagh from Australia’s National Dinosaur Museum. “Most dinosaurs found are only fragments because scavengers get there before they become fossils.”

Creagh says the region where Elliot was found is known as “the fossil triangle”, a huge area of Queensland rich in fossils. The rocks where Elliot was found, called the Winton formation, are reliably dated to the Cretaceous period, which means Elliot is 95 to 98 million years old.

Salisbury and his team will return to the Winton area in 2002 to complete a full-scale excavation of the land. “There’s got to be more down there,” he says.