Abstract

Vehicles exiting and entering a planetary atmosphere travel at high speeds generating flow regimes with extreme temperatures and complex chemical processes. A thorough understanding of these flows is necessary to design suitable spacecraft and optimise their performance both in terms of propulsion and in aerobraking. While flight testing and computer simulations have their place in the design process, ground-based testing using high speed flow facilities remains an important aspect of such research. At the University of Queensland, facilities have been developed to generate or simulate such flow conditions.

© 2014 Optical Society of America