In support of the Shuttle Return to Flight program, a tool was developed to predict when boundary layer transition would occur on the lower surface of the orbiter during reentry due to the presence of protuberances and cavities in the thermal protection system. This predictive tool was developed based on extensive wind tunnel tests conducted after the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Recognizing that wind tunnels cannot simulate the exact conditions an orbiter encounters as it re-enters the atmosphere, a preliminary attempt was made to use the documented flight related damage and the orbiter transition times, as deduced from flight instrumentation, to calibrate the predictive tool. After flight STS-114, the Boundary Layer Transition Team decided that a more in-depth analysis of the historical flight data was needed to better determine the root causes of the occasional early transition times of some of the past shuttle flights. In this paper we discuss our methodology for the analysis, the various sources of shuttle damage information, the analysis of the flight thermocouple data, and how the results compare to the Boundary Layer Transition prediction tool designed for Return to Flight.
Review of Orbiter Flight Boundary Layer Transition Data
9th AIAA/ASME Joint Thermophysics and Heat Transfer Conference ; 2006 ; San Francisco, CA, United States
2006-01-01
Aufsatz (Konferenz)
Keine Angabe
Englisch
Review of Orbiter Flight Boundary Layer Transition Data
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2006
|Review of Orbiter Flight Boundary Layer Transition Data
AIAA | 2006
|Orbiter Entry Boundary Layer Flight Testing
AIAA | 2008
|ORBITER BOUNDARY LAYER TRANSITION STABILITY MODELING AT FLIGHT ENTRY CONDITIONS
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2010
|Orbiter Entry Boundary Layer Flight Testing
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2008
|