A new rotating parachute design having high performance

A new concept of rotating parachute has been designed primarily for recovery of high-performance re-entry vehicles. Design and development/testing results are presented from low-speed wind tunnel testing, free-flight deployments at transonic speeds, and tests in a supersonic wind tunnel at Mach 2.0. Drag coefficients of 1.25 based on the disk area of the 2-ft-diam rotor have been measured in the wind tunnel. The stability of the rotor is excellent, with oscillation of its centerline being less than 3 deg. Good agreement between theoretical and measured performance parameters is shown.