Abstract

Ablative heat shield design for a sample return vehicle

Author(s): Giuseppe Pezzella

This paper provides a partial overview of the analysis approach typically followed within sample return vehicle design. A more systematic survey was out of the scope of the paper, but it gives some indications concerning main design topics to address in designing such a kind of vehicle for planetary exploration, as for example, effects of heat shield ablation and flow plasma radiation coupling with computational flowfield analysis.