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ESA's Draco To Study Heat Of Reentry
The European Space Agency (ESA) has put together a project to study the effects of reentry. The mission name is DRACO, which stands for "Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object".
(Draco testing at von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics)
At the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (VKI) in Belgium, researchers put a heat shield to the test, blasting it with scorching-hot flames to see how it would handle the intense temperatures it would experience when reentering Earth's atmosphere.The heat shield is for Draco, a European Space Agency mission that is literally designed to go up in flames. Draco stands for the Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object. The mission will send a satellite to space and back to collect data on the scorching experience of reentering Earth's atmosphere.
Science fiction writers were thinking about the heat of reentry from space in the 1930's. E.E. 'Doc' Smith described an ablative heat shield in Triplanetary (1934):
Back toward the trailing edges then, to a small escape-hatch beside which was fastened a dull black ball... He gasped as the air rushed out into near-vacuum... He rolled the ball out onto the hatch, where he opened it: two hinged hemispheres, each heavily padded with molded composition resembling sponge rubber......He curled up into one half of the ball; the other half closed over him and locked. The hatch opened. Ball and closely-prisoned man plummeted downward..
And as the ball bulleted downward on a screaming slant, it shrank!
...a synthetic which air-friction would erode away, molecule by molecule, so rapidly that no perceptible fragment of it would reach ground.
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