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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.
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]
The former Soviet Union suffered two disasters, and one near-disaster, all three involving the capsule during the de-orbit and reentry. Soyuz 1 ended in disaster when the parachutes failed to deploy and the capsule smashed into the earth at speeds over 300 mph (483 km/h), killing cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov .
The thermal energy is dissipated mainly by compression heating the air in a shockwave ahead of the vehicle using a blunt heat shield shape, with the aim of minimising the heat entering the vehicle. Sub-orbital space flights, being at a much lower speed, do not generate anywhere near as much [further explanation needed] heat upon re-entry.
In engineering, a heat shield is a component designed to protect an object or a human operator from being burnt or overheated by dissipating, reflecting, and/or absorbing heat. [1] The term is most often used in reference to exhaust heat management and to systems for dissipating frictional heat.
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 concept has also been used to extend the reentry time for vehicles returning to Earth from the Moon, which would otherwise have to shed a large amount of velocity in a short time and thereby suffer very high heating rates. The Apollo Command Module also used what is essentially a skip re-entry, as did the Soviet Zond and Chinese Chang'e 5-T1.
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 ...