Atmospheric Re-Entry Vehicle Mechanics

Ballistic reentry vehicles, capsules and planetary probes are the fastest human designed objects to fly through planet’s atmospheres. With velocities over Mach 20, RV’s have to dissipate a huge kinetic energy, and environment may exceed 100 g’s at center of mass, 100 bars stagnation pressure and 100 MW/m² on nosetip. Design of thermal protection system is a formidable material engineering problem. Vehicle conception covers large discipline realms, among which Aerodynamics and Flight Mechanics are essential as they only can provide necessary aeroshell shape, mass and inertia properties and tolerances to achieve adequate environment and trajectory performance. Capsules and probes have different missions and entry conditions but approaches and methods are identical. Based on a long engineering experience, this book offers a comprehensive and state of the art analysis of aerodynamic and flight mechanic entry topics. In addition, it provides a large set of application exercises and solutions. It is addressed to university and engineering school students, as well as engineers in aerospace companies and government agencies, or simply curious readers.