The frictions exerted during re-entry are enough to turn spacecraft into glowing slag comets if not diluted properly — good, when intended, but almost always very bad.
NASA notes that “using atmospheric resistance is the most mass-effective way to slow a spacecraft.” To survive these extreme temperatures, the shuttle relied on layers of ductile heat shields that melt in and out, taking excess heat with it, but for tomorrow’s reusable spacecraft, NASA has something better in mind, something inflatable.
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NASA has set a November 9 launch date for the LOFTID mission. It will depart from Vandenberg Space Force Base aboard a ULA Atlas rocket along with a NOAA “polar weather satellite.” After the satellite detaches from the upper stage of the Atlas rocket, LOFTID will open up and inflate into low Earth orbit before re-entering.
“One of the biggest differences is before the sub-orbital tests, getting to about 2.5 kilometers per second, which is hard enough,” said Steve Hughes, LOFTID chief at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in a press release. “But with LOFTID, we will be going at roughly 8 kilometers per second. That’s about three times faster, but that’s nine times the power.”
LOFTID Heat Shield provides four layers of protection against all that energy. The outer layer is made of ceramic and silicon carbide yarns from the same types of synthetic weavers that make jeans. The second and third layers are two types of insulation, and they are there to protect the fourth layer – the actual inflatable pieces. Everything is stacked in a series of concentric rings – themselves made of a polymer fabric ten times stronger than steel by weight – that will help direct the expansion of the armor.
NASA has been developing the Hypersonic Inflatable Air Decelerator (HIAD) technology for more than a decade. LOFTID (Low Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator) is the latest iteration of this technology, a new type of heat shield that potentially avoids many of the problems NASA has with the current generation of solid aerosols. Such solid armor has strict limits on its size, which is dictated by the diameter of the missile cover. Soft air shells do not experience this limitation and can extend far beyond the edge of the cap, allowing NASA to secure larger and heavier payloads as they enter the atmosphere.
This is especially important for future solar system exploration plans, because the other problem with current heat shields is that they only work in Earth’s atmosphere. You try to put something the size of a space shuttle on the surface of Mars and that exercise will end with your spacecraft with a very long streak smeared across the Red Planet – or a very short crater if you’re especially lucky.
Mars’ atmosphere isn’t thick enough to generate enough friction against modern-sized heat shields to safely slow the shuttle’s descent. So NASA is testing inflating it.
When LOFTID begins to descend, it will travel at more than 25 times the speed of sound. NASA predicts that eventually, LOFTID will crawl at a relatively weak 980 km/h. Over the course of your flight, the test shield’s onboard data logger will transmit the most relevant sensor and video data while storing as much onboard as possible in an outputable logger.
If all goes according to plan, the LOFTID shield will be slowed down enough to deploy a landing lane before landing in the Pacific Ocean and retaken by the ULA.
Across Engadget
Featured Image: Disclosure / NASA
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