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Dr. Peter Parameter considers the aerobraking and heating due to friction of spacecraft, or warheads, entering the atmosphere of Earth. Animated cartoon produced by Graphic Films. Illustrations include a swing-wing space shuttle.
US Air Force Training Film TF-5618
Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Atmospheric entry is the movement of an object into and through the gases of a planet’s atmosphere from outer space. There are two main types of atmospheric entry – uncontrolled entry, such as in the entry of celestial objects, space debris or bolides – and controlled entry, such as the entry (or reentry) of technology capable of being navigated or following a predetermined course.
Atmospheric drag and aerodynamic heating can cause atmospheric breakup capable of completely disintegrating smaller objects. These forces may cause objects with lower compressive strength to explode.
For Earth, atmospheric entry occurs above the Kármán Line at an altitude of more than 100 km above the surface while Venus atmospheric entry occurs at 250 km and Mars atmospheric entry at about 80 km. Uncontrolled, objects accelerate through the atmosphere at extreme velocities under the influence of Earth’s gravity. Most controlled objects enter at hypersonic speeds due to their suborbital (e.g. ICBM reentry vehicles), orbital (e.g. the Space Shuttle), or unbounded (e.g. meteors) trajectories. Various advanced technologies have been developed to enable atmospheric reentry and flight at extreme velocities. An alternative low velocity method of controlled atmospheric entry is buoyancy which is suitable for planetary entry where thick atmospheres, strong gravity or both factors complicate high-velocity hyperbolic entry, such as the atmospheres of Venus, Titan and the gas giants…
Aerodynamic heating is the heating of a solid body produced by the passage of fluid (such as air) over a body such as a meteor, missile, or airplane. It is a form of forced convection in that the flow field is created by forces beyond those associated with the thermal processes. The heat transfer essentially occurs at the vehicle surface where aerodynamic viscous forces ensures that the flow is at zero speed relative to the body for a very thin layer of molecules at the surface.
When fluid flow slows down its kinetic energy is converted to heat; in high speed flows, tremendous energy is represented by the mean motion of the flow. As the flow is slowed to near zero speed, its temperature increases, the gradient in the speed in a direction normal to the surface allows small scale mass transport effects to dissipate the temperature in the outward direction and thus the temperature at the surface is less than the stagnation temperature; the actual temperature is referred to as the recovery temperature. These viscous dissipative effects to neighboring sub-layers make the boundary layer slow down via a non-isentropic process. Heat then conducts into the surface material from the higher temperature air. The result is an increase in the temperature of the material and a loss of energy from the flow. The forced convection ensures that other material replenishes the gases that have cooled to continue the process.
The stagnation and the recovery temperature of a flow increases with the speed of the flow and are greater at high speeds. The total thermal loading of the structure is a function of both the recovery temperature and the mass flow rate of the flow. Aerodynamic heating is greatest at high speed and in the lower atmosphere where the density is greater. In addition to the convective process described above, there is also radiative heat transfer from the flow to the body and vice versa…
Aerodynamic heating increases with the speed of the vehicle and is continuous from zero speed. It produces much less heating at subsonic speeds but becomes more important at supersonic speeds. At these speeds it can induce temperatures that begin to weaken the materials that compose the object. The heating effects are greatest at leading edges…
