14 DAY TRIAL // As we announced yesterday, NASA conducted today its first flight test for the new Inflatable Re-entry Vehicle Experiment, or IRVE, a spacecraft that was specifically designed to protect carrying vehicles from the rigor of a harsh atmospheric reentry. The success of the current test will determine whether or not it will be used for future missions to the Moon or Mars, where rover-carrying structures as big as a car will have to be protected from the thousands of degrees' worth of temperature that are generated by the high-speed friction in the upper layers of the atmosphere.
Engineers at the NASA Langley Research Center announced today the first-ever flight test of the IRVE, in which the new inflatable system was deployed from aboard a Black Brant 9 missile, at an altitude of about 131 miles (211 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth. The delivery system took only four minutes to reach the designated altitude, after which time it released the 15-inch cylinder that housed the inflatable vehicle. One minute later, at an altitude of 124 miles (199.5 km), the system started deploying, and the ten-foot disc was opened in less than 90 seconds.
“This was a huge success. IRVE was a small-scale demonstrator. Now that we've proven the concept, we'd like to build more advanced aeroshells capable of handling higher heat rates,” IRVE Project Manager Mary Beth Wusk, from the Langley Center, explains. The sounding rocket was launched from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, in Wallops Island, Virginia.
“Everything performed well even into the subsonic range where we weren't sure what to expect. The telemetry looks good. The inflatable bladder held up well,” the chief scientist for the Hypersonics Project at the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Fundamental Aeronautics Program, Neil Cheatwood, also the principal investigator for the IRVE mission, says. The aeroshell itself was made from several layers of high-tech, silicon-coated Kevlar fibers, which are elastic, light-weight, and able to withstand thousands of degrees of temperature.
“We'd like to be able to land more mass on Mars. To land more mass you have to have more drag. We need to maximize the drag area of the entry system. We want to make it as big as we can, but the limitation has been the launch vehicle diameter,” Cheatwood said yesterday.