A Study on Earth Re-entry Capsules with Deployable Aerobrakes for Recoverable Microgravity Experiments

Abstract

Deployable aerobrakes for Earth re-entry capsules may offer many advantages in the near future, including the opportunity to recover on Earth scientific payloads from the Space with reduced risks and costs with respect to conventional systems. Such capsules can be accommodated in the selected launcher in folded configuration optimizing the available volume and, when planned by the mission profile, the aerobrake can be deployed in order to increase the surface exposed to the hypersonic flow and therefore to reduce the ballistic parameter. This can offer as main advantage the opportunity to perform an aerodynamic de-orbit of the system without the need of a dedicated propulsive subsystem and an atmospheric re-entry with reduced aerothermal and mechanical loads making possible the use of relatively lightweight and cheap thermal protection system materials. To ensure the recovery of the capsule, the deployable surface can be modulated to obtain the aerodynamic control of the de-orbit trajectory in order to correctly target the capsule towards the selected landing site for post-flight analyses and operations. The main objective of the work is to present a number of feasible mission profiles for orbital platforms to/from Low Earth Orbit aimed in particular at scientific experiments in microgravity conditions. In addition, a suborbital scenario for a technological demonstrator, useful to experimentally verify the system applicability before the design of orbital missions, is also presented and discussed.