Nasa has successfully conducted a flight test to demonstrate an inflatable heat shield on a spacecraft that can be used to protect the vehicle while it re-enters earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds.
The inflatable re-entry vehicle experiment (IRVE) has been vacuum-packed into a 15in diameter payload shroud and launched on a small sounding rocket from a Nasa flight facility.
The 10ft-diameter heat shield, made of several layers of silicone-coated industrial fabric mounted on the Black Brant 9 rocket inflated with nitrogen to a mushroom shape in space minutes after lift-off.
Nasa’s Langley Research Centre IRVE hypersonics project principal investigator and chief scientist Neil Cheatwood said this is the first time anyone has successfully flown an inflatable re-entry vehicle.
The research focused on the period when the aeroshell re-entered earth’s atmosphere and experienced peak heating and pressure measurements for a period of about 30 seconds.
The real time data was captured by an on-board telemetry system and relayed to the ground.
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By GlobalDataNasa plans to build more advanced aeroshells capable of handling higher heat rates now that the small scale demonstrator has proven the IRVE concept.
