Afterbody Aeroheating Flight Data for Planetary Probe Thermal Protection System Design

摘要

The Mercury and Gemini programs included a total of eight test flights from which afterbody aeroheating and pressure data were obtained. Although of significant historical interest, the utility of the data from these flights is somewhat compromised by the corrugated afterbody surface employed, which would likely be difficultto accurately model because of complex fluid dynamics and multidimensional conduction effects. In contrast, the data obtained during Project Fire and the Apollo program provide an invaluable resource for the validation of modern computational tools for afterbody aero-heating. The six flight tests provide data spanning the entire range of Earth-entry conditions, from axisymmetric to three dimensional, noncontinuum to continuum, laminar to turbulent, and nonablating to fully ablating. The European ARD flight, together with the American Reentry F, are additional valuable resources for Earth-entry base heating. Recent papers have looked at Fire-II, Apollo AS-202, and ARD flight heating data and have shown that modern computational methods appear to be fully capable of predicting afterbody heating to within the uncertainty of the flight data, at least for laminar flows without ablation. Limited data also exist for afterbody heating from the Pathfinder mission at Mars and the Galileo entry to Jupiter. None of these non-Earth-entry data have yet been examined in detail using full-body CFD analysis.