Heat shield of Draco’s capsule throughout testing

ESA is preparing the Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object (Draco) mission that will collect unique measurements during an actual reentry and breakup of a satellite from the inside. A capsule especially designed to survive the destruction will transmit the valuable telemetry shortly after.

The capsule’s Thermal Protection System was tested at half-scale in VKI’s wind tunnels to evaluate its design.  

Researchers at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (VKI) conduct fundamental studies on how materials behave and burn under extreme conditions. That knowledge is now applied to Draco and in particular its capsule that must survive reentry.

“We developed and tested the capsule heat shield, made from Portuguese cork by Amorim, together with the insulation system for the internal instrumentation, combining specially designed insulation by ETEX and ablative fibre felts by SGL Carbon,” says Bernd Helber, Draco technical lead at VKI.

“We then tested if all the relevant systems can survive. We simulate conditions that replicate atmospheric reentry as closely as possible with hot and cold tests in our wind tunnels, including hitting the capsule with streams of plasma that are as beautiful as they are destructive.”