Patent — available for licensing
Multistage Free-Flight Testing System
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
During atmospheric entry of blunt-body vehicles, such as a crew capsule or planetary probe, travel through the supersonic and transonic regimes can induce divergent instabilities due to dynamic stability issues, the fundamental understanding of which remains incomplete. Traditional qualification methods such as ballistic ranges, wind tunnels, and computation simulations can provide aerodynamic performance data for various flight conditions, but each has limitations or requires extensive validation. To address the need to understand dynamic stability issues of re-entry vehicles, NASA Ames has developed a multistage flight system architecture capable of testing vehicles through supersonic and transonic Mach numbers. This architecture enables the acquisition of rich, flight-relevant data related to dynamic stability and other key aerodynamic parameters.