Infrared countermeasure

Imagine you are playing a game of tag with your friends. You are "it" and you need to chase and catch your friends. But your friends have a secret trick up their sleeves, they have a special spray that they can use to cover themselves and make themselves invisible to you, so you cannot catch them. This spray is called an infrared countermeasure.

In real life, this infrared countermeasure is used by airplanes and helicopters to protect themselves from being targeted by heat-seeking missiles. You see, these missiles are very smart and can track the heat emitted by a flying aircraft from a long distance.

To avoid getting hit by these missiles, airplanes and helicopters use special flares that can emit a lot of heat and fool the missile into thinking that the flare is the aircraft it was originally targeting. So, instead of hitting the real aircraft, the missile will explode near the flare and miss its target.

Just like how your friends use their special spray to make themselves invisible to you, airplanes and helicopters use infrared countermeasures to make themselves invisible to heat-seeking missiles.