The following paper outlines the importance of vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) aerothermodynamic heating during re-entry, the current level of uncertainty in the models used to predict radiative heating load, and the challenges associated with reducing this uncertainty. A method has been developed at The Centre for Hypersonics that allows the capture of VUV emission spectra from across and through the surface of a blunt model. Two superorbital conditions were generated to match high-speed points on a re-entry trajectory and validated computationally and experimentally. The proposed system has been constructed and a calibration procedure developed. There have now been over one hundred experiments at superorbital velocities conducted with this system and some sample uncalibrated spectral images are presented.
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