Breaks records in sonic speeds on land.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed an electromagnetic launch system capable of accelerating vehicles to supersonic speeds directly on the ground, exceeding Match One, that is, more than 1,200 km/h. This type of technology known as electromagnetic sledding had already been studied for decades by countries such as the United States and the former Soviet Union, but it always faced technical limitations that prevented its reliable use at extreme speeds.

The challenge was not only to accelerate the vehicle, but to maintain control, at speeds close to or above the sound barrier, the system faces highly unstable aerodynamic forces, in addition to shock waves that can directly interfere with the sensors responsible for measuring speed and position. In practice, this means that the system itself loses the ability to know how fast it is moving, making any errors potentially catastrophic. The solution found by the Chinese scientists was to completely eliminate the dependence on external sensors, instead the system extracts information directly from the electrical behavior of the coils that propel the sled along the track.

As the vehicle accelerates, small voltage variations in those coils contain precise data about the speed, these signals are analyzed by an algorithm that combines multiple readings, filters out interference caused by shock waves and adjusts the data in real time. The result is a system capable of measuring speed with an error of less than 1.1%, even at speeds greater than 370 m per second. That level of precision allows something that was not possible before, stable control in supersonic regime, this means that the technology may be just the beginning of something greater, a new type of infrastructure capable of operating at speeds that until recently were restricted only to the aerial environment.