Thermal response of a re-entry vehicle encompassing aerodynamic heating

A space shuttle experiences extremely intense aerodynamic heating during its reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere due to sudden compression of the air near the surface of the vehicle as well as due to viscous dissipation. To protect the vehicle from these enormous thermal loads, a thermal protection system has to be devised so that components inside the space shuttle are not harmed. In order to design a suitable thermal protection system, it is imperative to determine the thermal response of the vehicle. The paper involves discussion on a program developed to calculate the same and plot the temperature vs. time graph for the stagnation point of the space shuttle re-entering into the atmosphere. This can also be extended to the windward and leeward regions by using existing correlations. The program requires atmospheric data & space shuttle trajectory details such as time, altitude, velocity as input and the program logic is derived from the basic one dimensional heat balance relation.