Hypersonic Aerothermochemistry Duplication in Ground Plasma Facilities: A Flight-to-Ground Approach

High conservative safety margins, applied to the design of spacecraft thermal protection systems for planetary entry, need to be reduced for higher efficiency of future space missions. Ground testing of such protection systems is of great importance during the design phase. This study covers a methodology for simulating the complex hypersonic entry aerothermochemistry in a plasma wind tunnel for a given spacecraft geometry without any assumption on axisymmetry or bluntness. A demonstration of this proposed methodology is made on the Qubesat for Aerothermodynamic Research and Measurements on AblatioN, QARMAN mission, which is a rectangular reentry CubeSat with a cork-based ablative thermal protection system in the front unit. The reacting boundary-layer profiles of the hypersonic entry probe compare well with the ones developing at the stagnation region of the plasma test model, defined with the proposed flight-to-ground duplication method.