28 — Airguide

Atmospheric Guidance and Navigation System

What It Is

Airguide is Hardin Labs' integrated atmospheric sensing, route optimization, and autonomous navigation system designed specifically for operation in contested, degraded, and GPS-denied environments — conditions encountered by the DART aircraft during hypersonic flight through ionized plasma sheaths, low-altitude terrain following, and adversarial electromagnetic environments. Airguide combines galinstan-liquid-metal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow sensors, Silixon-HCB-based phased-array radar, inertial navigation implemented on the SIP processor, and a real-time atmospheric model updated by the Silixon Cube to provide continuous precision navigation without external signal dependency.

Sensor Suite

The primary attitude and velocity sensor in Airguide is a galinstan MHD accelerometer and gyroscope array: each sensor element is a sealed Silixon-PDC channel filled with galinstan, with orthogonal magnetic field coils surrounding it. Vehicle acceleration or rotation drives the galinstan liquid metal to flow through the channel; the motion of the conducting fluid through the magnetic field generates a measurable Faraday voltage proportional to the flow velocity, providing sub-microgravity acceleration sensitivity and sub-arcsecond angular resolution with no moving parts and no electrical noise floor from mechanical bearings. This solid-state MHD sensor suite maintains full accuracy inside the ionization plasma sheath that surrounds the DART at hypersonic speeds — a regime where conventional GPS and RF navigation systems are blacked out.

Route Intelligence

The Airguide software layer, running on the Silixon Cube, maintains a real-time 3D atmospheric model updated by onboard LIDAR, radar, and pressure sensor arrays. Optimal route planning is performed by the SIP processor using a Silixon-GPU-accelerated pathfinding algorithm that balances fuel consumption, thermal load on the airframe, radar cross-section minimization, and time-to-target simultaneously. Airguide's holographic interface drives the HIG cockpit display with a three-dimensional moving map and threat visualization that gives the human pilot or autonomous control system full situational awareness in any environmental condition.