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The first reentry test of a PICA-X heat shield was on the Dragon C1 mission on 8 December 2010. [35] The PICA-X heat shield was designed, developed and fully qualified by a small team of a dozen engineers and technicians in less than four years. [33] PICA-X is ten times less expensive to manufacture than the NASA PICA heat shield material. [36]
Aerodynamic heating is the heating of a solid body produced by its high-speed passage through air. In science and engineering, an understanding of aerodynamic heating is necessary for predicting the behaviour of meteoroids which enter the Earth's atmosphere, to ensure spacecraft safely survive atmospheric reentry, and for the design of high-speed aircraft and missiles.
There are additional requirements for atmospheric reentry. If the angle of attack is too shallow, the capsule may skip off the surface of the atmosphere. If the angle of attack is too steep, the deceleration forces may be too high or the heat of reentry may exceed the tolerances of the heat shield.
The thermal control subsystem can be composed of both passive and active items and works in two ways: Protects the equipment from overheating, either by thermal insulation from external heat fluxes (such as the Sun or the planetary infrared and albedo flux), or by proper heat removal from internal sources (such as the heat emitted by the internal electronic equipment).
The communications blackouts that affect spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, which are also known as radio blackouts, ionization blackouts, or reentry blackouts, are caused by an envelope of ionized air around the craft, created by the heat from the compression of the atmosphere by the craft. The ionized air interferes with radio ...
The research team is particularly interested in the 70–40-kilometer (43–25 mi) altitude range of the SpaceX "reentry burn" on the Falcon 9 Earth-entry tests as this is the "powered flight through the Mars-relevant retropulsion regime" that models Mars entry and descent conditions, [9] although SpaceX is of course interested also in the ...
Thermal mass is any material that can be used to store heat—heat from the Sun in the case of solar energy. Common thermal mass materials include stone, cement, and water. Historically they have been used in arid climates or warm temperate regions to keep buildings cool by absorbing solar energy during the day and radiating stored heat to the ...
A hot shock wave was created in front of the vehicle, which deflected most of the heat and prevented the orbiter's surface from directly contacting the peak heat. Therefore, reentry heating was largely convective heat transfer between the shock wave and the orbiter's skin through superheated plasma. [1]