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The technology to reach another planet or the moon is only worth if you can not land there. Each landing has its own challenges, but the celestial bodies with a particularly frustrating atmosphere. For decades, the heat shields that protect spacecraft during entry into the atmosphere were rigid and heavy, but NASA has just tested a flexible umbrella-like heat shield that could make space missions more practical.
The flexible heat shield is known as Adaptable Deployable Entry and Placement Technology (ADEPT) and was developed at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. NASA's goal is to make thermal shields bigger while reducing weight – it's a long-awaited spaceship design field for change.
Spacecraft move at fantastic speeds as they descend to the surface and compress the atmospheric gas. Compression causes a pressure shock, leading to intense heating in front of the spacecraft up to 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit (3,000 Celsius). Even a thin atmosphere like Mars can cause significant heat build-up. Today's spaceships use aerosols to hold the payload as it enters an atmosphere. Aerosols are generally made of thick phenolic plastic and are removed (peeled off) under intense heat to protect the spacecraft. Plastic is not flexible and weighs a lot. Thus, the heat shields can not exceed the diameter of the rocket that launched them.
ADEPT could change all that. His composed of layers of 3D woven carbon fabric stretched over articulated ribs and struts. Rather than carrying out the ablation, ADEPT re-emits heat absorbed with great efficiency to keep the payload cool. As it is flexible, the shield can be folded to fit into a rocket, and then deploy to cover a much larger area. ADEPT could help larger spacecraft slow down and avoid heat damage when entering the atmosphere.
The September 12 th flight featured a 15-minute suborbital flight. The rocket lifted the prototype at an altitude of 60 miles (technically in space) and released it. ADEPT traveled as fast as Mach 3 (2,300 mph), which is slower than it was moving in space from space. However, this test was aimed primarily at evaluating engineering and aerodynamics.
With the first test flight in the books, NASA indicates that the next step for ADEPT is to return to the Earth's atmosphere at orbital speeds greater than 27,000 km / h (27,000 km / h) . The agency has not yet set a date for this test.
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