Aerospace Mechanics Research Center (AMReC)

CU Engineering faculty land prestigious multidisciplinary Department of Defense projects

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 15:24:05 +0000

CU Engineering faculty land prestigious multidisciplinary Department of Defense projects Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/22/2024 - 09:24

Three faculty members from the CU Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science are conducting projects awarded through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program.

The highly competitive research program has been enabling major contributions to military capabilities and producing commercial sector applications since 1985.

“Our college emphasizes collaboration across various research disciplines,” said Michael Gooseff, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering and Applied Science. “By prioritizing programs like MURI, we harness the diverse expertise across STEM fields to push the envelope for scientific breakthroughs.”

The three new MURI projects in the college include:

Mahmoud Hussein, professor in aerospace engineering sciences and in physics, will improve air flow across the wings and bodies of hypersonic aircraft through the use of phononic subsurface materials;
Francois Barthelat, professor in mechanical engineering, will develop and validate models for the failure of materials and structures under extreme loads; and
Scott Diddams, professor in electrical, computer and energy engineering and in physics, will examine the fundamental limits in heterodyne detection of thermal radiation with laser light.

Hussein is the main principal investigator and represents CU Boulder as the lead institution for that MURI project. Barthelat and Diddams will be collaborating on projects led by faculty from other peer institutions.

Each project will receive an average award of $7.5 million over the next five years.

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CU Boulder researcher lands NASA grant to advance hypersonics modeling

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 20:35:16 +0000

CU Boulder researcher lands NASA grant to advance hypersonics modeling Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/09/2024 - 13:35

Jeff Zehnder

Robyn Macdonald is pushing the limits of hypersonic research with a new NASA grant.

Macdonald, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��Ƶ, has been awarded a $600,000 Early Career award from NASA to improve computational modeling of turbulence at hypersonic speeds.

“If you’re flying at Mach 25, there is a lot of kinetic energy present in the gas that gets converted into other forms of energy before reaching the surface of your spacecraft, aircraft, or entry capsule,” Macdonald said. “Fully understanding this process is a really hard problem and is important for things like heat shield design and post-flight reconstruction.”

During hypersonic flight, the temperature of air and other gases around a vehicle can reach thousands of degrees, triggering chemical reactions. Despite recent developments in hypersonic vehicle design, the interaction of these chemical reactions with the surrounding hypersonic turbulent flow is not well understood.

“You need very detailed information, and you’re looking at a variety of scales in both time and space. The calculations become very expensive,” Macdonald said. “As a result there are deficiencies in the current models.”

Most current computational work for design of hypersonic vehicles uses a turbulence model called a Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes solution (RANS). RANS is computationally efficient, making it attractive for design processes, but Macdonald said it relies on models which may be invalid for certain hypersonic regimes.

“It’s the current design paradigm, but its applicability is not well characterized for hypersonic flows, and we need better predictions as space missions go further into our solar system to places we don’t understand as well as Earth,” Macdonald said. “We can’t run dozens of experiments in a simulated Mars or Jupiter’s moon Titan environment in advance, so these models are really important.”

Macdonald intends to develop a Wall Modeled Large Eddy Simulation (WMLES) model which includes the relevant chemistry for hypersonic flows. WMLES provides an improvement over RANS by predicting the larger scale turbulent structures while making simplifying assumptions about the small scales of turbulence. However, there does not currently exist a WMLES model which includes the chemical reactions relevant for hypersonic flows. The innovation of this work is the inclusion of the chemistry within WMLES.

It is a significant undertaking requiring supercomputers; Macdonald expects to use CU Boulder’s Blanca Condo Cluster as well as NASA’s Pleiades Supercomputer.

Over the course of the three-year grant, Macdonald and her team will formulate equations, write and verify software to conduct the analysis, and then run test cases to validate their results.

“It’s a big project, and I’m really excited. I like the chemistry. I like turbulence. This is exactly my area,” Macdonald said.

This is Macdonald’s second major hypersonics grant in as many years. She previously received a Young Investigator Research Program award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to study gas-phase chemical reactions in the boundary layer at the surface of hypersonic vehicles.

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7 reasons to get excited about CU Boulder in space

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 17:11:43 +0000

7 reasons to get excited about CU Boulder in space Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/13/2023 - 11:11

This year, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) celebrates its 75th anniversary—marking 75 years of CU Boulder’s exploration of space, from the fringes of Earth’s atmosphere to the wide expanse of interstellar space.

The university is just getting started. In the year ahead, scientists and engineers from across campus will take part in the first U.S. landing on the moon’s south pole, launch several pint-sized satellites into orbit around Earth, and begin a journey to Jupiter’s dark and frigid moon Europa.

Follow along to learn what the next year holds in store for CU Boulder in space.

What goes up...

The festivities are scheduled to kick off Oct. 29 as a team from LASP launches a first-of-its-kind instrument in space from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico—to investigate the fallout from an explosion that roiled a corner of the galaxy roughly 15,000 years ago.

The launch is part of the Integral Field Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Experiment (INFUSE). The mission will shoot a rocket to about 250 miles above Earth’s surface, where it will point its instrument up into space, before falling back to Earth.

INFUSE is trying to learn more about the structure of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, a shock wave that was formed millennia ago as a star died in the constellation Cygnus the Swan.

And don’t miss these other upcoming missions that include scientists and engineers from LASP: SNIFS, EXIS and TSIS-2 will probe the sun and its radiation, while GOES-U will monitor weather on Earth and in space.

Image: Cygnus Loop (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Historic return

Well, hello, moon. Long time no see. CU Boulder researchers will soon take part in an effort to land science payloads from the United States on the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo era.

The event is part of NASA’s inaugural Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission. On Nov. 15, a NOVA-C lander built by the company Intuitive Machines is scheduled to launch for the moon’s south pole. Aboard will be an instrument called Radio wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath (ROLSES). ROLSES, made up of four antennas, will map out the layer of charged particles that hovers just about the surface of the moon—and could pose risks to future lunar astronauts.

“We are going to the surface of the moon for the first time in over 50 years,” said Jack Burns, a co-investigator on the instrument and professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences.

Image: Moon's south pole (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Happy birthday, MAVEN

A special spacecraft is celebrating a big birthday this year. Nov. 18 marks the 10th anniversary of the 2013 launch of NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission. Several of the instruments on the spacecraft were designed and built by scientists and engineers in Boulder at LASP.

MAVEN is helping to solve a Red Planet mystery: How did Mars, which was likely covered in oceans billions of years ago, lose all of its water? Data from the spacecraft revealed that radiation from the sun stripped away the planet’s atmosphere over time—transforming it into the cold and desolate landscape it is today.

MAVEN is still orbiting the planet and trying to unlock Mars’ secrets today.

Image: Artist's depiction of MAVEN at Mars. (Credit: NASA/GSFC)

Whoosh!

Hear that? A new, high-tech engineering lab is heading for campus—at speeds of nearly Mach 30, or more than 20,000 miles per hour.

In July, the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences kicked off construction on a new hypersonics research facility. This plasma wind tunnel will allow scientists to recreate what happens to spacecraft when they smack into Earth’s atmosphere at incredible speeds, heating up to temperatures of more than 17,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The new wind tunnel is the brainchild of Assistant Professor Hisham Ali, and construction should wrap up in 2024. Now that’s fast.

Image: Hisham Ali

Shadowy science

In the coming year, two eerie astronomical events are heading for North America: On Oct. 14, 2023, parts of the western U.S. will witness an annular, or “ring of fire,” solar eclipse. Then in April 2024, a total solar eclipse will similarly pass above swaths of Texas, Arkansas and more.

To celebrate these rare, and dark, events, the Fiske Planetarium has launched a series of videos and outreach activities called Science through Shadows. In addition to featuring eclipses, the program will explore the unique physics that scientists can explore during “occultations” and “transits”—or when one celestial body, like a moon or planet, passes in front of another, like a star, briefly blocking out its light. The project is led by Douglas Duncan, professor emeritus of astrophysical and planetary sciences, and John Keller, director of Fiske.

“There is science that can be done during eclipses, occultations and transits,” Keller said. “One technique for discovering planets in other systems is by detecting them as they transit in front of stars."

CubeSats galore

Little satellites. Big science.

In the coming year or more, scientists at CU Boulder are scheduled to launch four CubeSats into space. These petite spacecraft are no bigger than a toaster oven but will collect scientific data that far outstrip their size. They include Climatology of Anthropogenic and Natural VLF wave Activity in Space (CANVAS) led by Robert Marshall, associate professor of aerospace engineering. CANVAS will orbit Earth, tracking the bursts of energy that fly into space when lightning strikes—which happens a whopping 50 times per second on our planet.

Learn more about CANVAS and these other, upcoming CubeSat missions: AEPEX, MAXWELL and SPRITE.

Image: Artist's depiction of the Supernova Remnants and Proxies for ReIonization Testbed Experiment (SPRITE) CubeSat. (Credit: LASP)

Flagship launch

In October 2024, Colorado’s big year in space is scheduled to end with a bang—a literal one—as NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft blasts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This flagship mission will carry with it a roughly $50 million instrument called the SUrface Dust Analyzer (SUDA) designed and built at LASP.

They’re going on a long journey: Europa Clipper will travel nearly 2 billion miles to Jupiter and its moon Europa—a body about the size of Earth’s moon where a thick layer of ice surrounds a deep ocean. There, the mission will explore whether Europa harbors conditions that could support living organisms.

It’s a good beginning for CU Boulder’s next 75 years of space exploration.

Image: SUDA in a cleanroom at LASP. (Credit: Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder)

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CU Boulder to lead million-dollar DARPA computational microelectronics research

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 16:29:45 +0000

CU Boulder to lead million-dollar DARPA computational microelectronics research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/14/2023 - 10:29

Jeff Zehnder

Above: Sanghamitra Neogi
Headline Video: Heat flow in nanoscale materials with confined dimensions.

Sanghamitra Neogi has earned a key Department of Defense contract to tackle a big problem with tiny electronics: microchips crippled by heat.

An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��Ƶ, Neogi is leading a multi-university research team to revolutionize how manufacturers model and deal with heat in computers.

“Thermal challenges are very much known, but right now management of it is very trial and error,” Neogi said.

It is well documented that microchips and transistors fail due to heating challenges. Mitigation to this point has primarily been through bigger fans and cooling channels, but as chips have gotten smaller to pack in more processing power, heat has become a larger issue.

“With microelectronics, we are moving away from planar chips to 3D stacked chips because it makes memory and processing quicker, but you can’t cool the inner channels using regular methods because you don’t have the real estate. The current ideas don’t work very well,” Neogi said.

To find new solutions, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Neogi’s team a $1 million contract over 18 months to create an atomistic thermal model of microelectronic systems. In addition to CU Boulder, the team also includes Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin from the University of California, Berkeley and Prof. Kaushik Roy from Purdue University.

Neogi and her team will start by creating computational thermal model of individual transistors at the deeply scaled nanometer level, one millionth of a millimeter in size, and will then expand the model to a millimeter-scale circuit element with 300,000 transistors.

“We’re going to predict how the temperature map looks like; which zones are hot and which zones are cold. But most importantly, why certain zones are hot and cold,” she said.

Although the chips are extremely small, the modeling is a significant undertaking, requiring supercomputing resources, machine learning, and artificial intelligence Neogi said.

“Inclusion of AI at different length scales will be a major component of this research. Right now thermal modeling is very trial and error. We want to be able to instead predict how things will fail. If we are successful, we will have a new thermal approach not just for chips, but microelectronic circuits, sensors, devices. We are building a method that scales dramatically,” she said.

Although DARPA is interested in the research from a military application perspective, the work could also have broad applications across all electronic devices.

Neogi is especially excited about the project’s alignment with the federal CHIPS Act of 2022, which seeks to dramatically expand semiconductor research and development in the United States. Although her project is funded separately, the work is highly synced with CHIPS research.

“This is a fundamental thing that is at the heart of all electronics. Thermal challenges affect all of them at the very core,” she said.

The full title of the DARPA program is Thermal Modeling of Nanoscale Transistors (Thermonat). The contract officially begins August 14, 2023.

Sanghamitra Neogi has earned a key Department of Defense contract to tackle a big problem with tiny electronics: microchips crippled by heat. An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��Ƶ, Neogi is leading a multi-university research team to...

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Construction underway on plasma wind tunnel to advance hypersonics

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 17:07:31 +0000

Construction underway on plasma wind tunnel to advance hypersonics Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/27/2023 - 11:07

Jeff Zehnder

Hisham Ali

The sounds of construction permeate the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building at the �鶹��Ƶ. The bang of hammers. The wail of electric saws. A new laboratory for a plasma wind tunnel is taking shape.

The project is the vision of Assistant Professor Hisham Ali. It will allow his team to study the conditions of atmospheric reentry, when a spacecraft returning to Earth can hit speeds of Mach 30 and experience temperatures in excess of 10,000 degrees Kelvin (17,540 degrees Fahrenheit).

The aerospace building is still new, having only been completed in 2019, but the research Ali hopes to conduct has special requirements that necessitate renovations. It has taken more than a year of preparation just to begin the construction.

“We’re building a novel system. It’s not a turnkey purchase, and determining all the requirements was challenging,” Ali said. “What do we need for this work? What equipment is necessary – vacuum pumps are required, but what models meet our performance needs? Then the specs go to an architect so they can do layout with an electrical engineer. Then we worked with a mechanical engineering contractor to determine how much extra cooling we need in the room. It’s very involved.”

Electricity is a particular demand. A major component of the project is a high-power radio frequency (RF) generator that can draw over 100 kilowatts during operation. That comes on top of three 30-kilowatt vacuum pumps and an air compressor and chilled water pump that utilize over 25 kilowatts. All of these items use more power on their own than the average U.S. household consumes at any time.

“What we’re doing here at CU Boulder is studying this high-temperature hypersonic plasma environment. To study how we interact with this plasma electromagnetically, we have to simulate these extreme conditions in our laboratory,” Ali said.

In addition to moving walls and adding new conduit and cooling lines, the construction crew must also reinforce the floor in the lab to accommodate a mezzanine structure that will hold more than 20,000 pounds of equipment.

Ali joined the aerospace faculty at CU Boulder in 2022. Since then, design for the laboratory has been his major focus. He is excited at the possibilities the lab present both for advancing science and as a teaching environment.

“Construction of this inside an academic building means we can integrate really well with the educational program, with student work and classes,” Ali said. “One of the advantages of an RF plasma facility is you can run the plasma jet for hours in a continuous fashion. We plan to do experiments as often as possible.”

Construction began on July 17. It should take a little more than six months to complete.

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Popular Mechanics interviews Boyd on hypersonic weapons tracking

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:11:54 +0000

Popular Mechanics interviews Boyd on hypersonic weapons tracking Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/29/2023 - 08:11

Iain Boyd was interviewed for a new article in Popular Mechanics on efforts to track hypersonic weapons.

At issue? Hypersonic weapons often travel at fast enough speeds to generate a sheath of plasma, which can obscure them to radar. Traditional missiles travel at comparably slower speeds and are much easier to monitor and potentially intercept midflight.

“It is only the very fastest hypersonic vehicles that create enough plasma for radar to be a consideration,” Boyd explains. Scramjet cruise missiles are “very fast and create a lot of energy, but they are not fast enough to create all those charged particles.”

Boyd, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, is also the director of the CU Boulder Center for National Security Initiatives. He is a leading researcher in hypersonic aerothermodynamics.

Read the full article at Popular Mechanics

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Video: Computational Modeling of Hypersonic Flows

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 18:49:57 +0000

Video: Computational Modeling of Hypersonic Flows Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/22/2023 - 11:49

Robyn Macdonald is an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at CU Boulder. Her research interests include hypersonic flows, computation of chemically reacting flows, chemical kinetics, and radiation modeling. Her work has broad applications for hypersonic vehicles for space travel, national defense and other applications.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-gPrvkmXyw]

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Building a one-of-a-kind plasma wind tunnel to advance hypersonics at CU Boulder

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 22:25:01 +0000

Building a one-of-a-kind plasma wind tunnel to advance hypersonics at CU Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/21/2023 - 15:25

Jeff Zehnder

Hisham Ali is pushing the limits of plasma physics and hypersonics in his lab on campus to advance a nationally important area of science and engineering.

Ali, an assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the �鶹��Ƶ, studies magnetohydrodynamics. It is the investigation of the magnetic properties and behavior of electrically conducting fluids, such as the plasmas generated during extremely high-speed flight – a critical area for hypersonic vehicles.

“It’s fluid mechanics, plasma physics, fluids interacting electrically. We’re specifically looking at what happens when a spacecraft reenters the atmosphere. There is a tremendous need for funding hypersonic research as a nation,” Ali said.

Ali’s team is currently building a plasma wind tunnel, a highly complex undertaking to conduct experimental research of the conditions space vehicles experience during atmospheric reentry.

“We have a unique opportunity. These kinds of facilities don’t come online very often. We here at CU Boulder as well as others in the outside scientific and engineering community are very excited,” Ali said.

As he and his team endeavor to complete construction and begin experiments in the plasma wind tunnel, they are also conducting mission design and computational trajectory work.

“It’s modeling, mission design, and trajectory work for a Neptune plasma-assisted aerocapture probe in addition to the work on the wind tunnel. We’re very busy,” Ali said.

The work is a culmination of sorts for Ali. Growing up, he decided early to become an aerospace engineer, but despite excelling in science and math it was not a sure thing.

“My parents emigrated from Sudan when I was a year old. They had earned doctorates in Sudan in veterinary medicine, but that didn’t carry over to the United States and they had to re-enroll in graduate school here. Both of my parents worked nights and weekends in fast food to support us for most of the 1990s while they completed their studies. When I earned scholarships to go to college, it was very helpful to us,” Ali said.

He successfully earned the National Achievement Scholarship, a college fellowship designed to increase opportunities for Black students. Ali said as an honor intended for specific groups, there were some challenges.

“People said it wasn’t fair because they thought the bar was lower for the Achievement Scholarship compared to the National Merit Scholarship,” Ali said. “They’re both very competitive, and then I also received the National Merit Scholarship. There’s sometimes a perception you’re not as good.”

He then attended the University of Alabama and participated in internships at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville. Ali enjoyed research, but was not sure if graduate school was for him.

“Thankfully, the people I knew at NASA encouraged me to apply to graduate school and to NASA graduate fellowships,” Ali said. “I also had a very supportive undergraduate research advisor at the University of Alabama. They told me I was good enough.”

Ali went on to Georgia Tech, where he earned his master’s and PhD in aerospace engineering and met his wife, who has a PhD of her own in biomedical engineering. They then came to Colorado so she could earn another doctorate in medicine at the CU Anschutz Campus. Ali worked for the Aerospace Corporation in Colorado Springs for a year before officially joining CU Boulder in 2022.

Ali said he also hopes to enhance the environment for other budding Black engineers during his time on campus and in the department.

“I had mentors who happened to be Black who said there’s a place for you. Not only is this for you, you’re needed here. I want to do that for others,” Ali said.

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Faculty in Focus: Sanghamitra Neogi

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 17:07:50 +0000

Faculty in Focus: Sanghamitra Neogi Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/30/2023 - 10:07

Jeff Zehnder

Sanghamitra Neogi is designing new materials at the quantum level to realize future technologies for thermal management and harsh environments like hypersonic flight.

An assistant professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Materials Science and Engineering Program, Neogi leads the CUANTUM laboratory, short for CU Aerospace Nanoscale Transport Modelling.

The lab is also leading the way in investigating novel pathways to transport energy and information in nanoscale materials to optimize existing technologies.

Watch the video below to find out more:

[video:https://youtu.be/lFeyIEYRusc]

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A NASA spacecraft will soon enter Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 25,000 mph. What will happen next?

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 16:18:27 +0000

A NASA spacecraft will soon enter Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 25,000 mph. What will happen next? Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/09/2022 - 09:18

Sunday at around 10:40 a.m. MT, NASA’s Orion spacecraft will splash down in the Pacific Ocean after its several week-long journey to the moon and back. Space buffs can tune into NASA's livestream to witness some extreme physics—what will be the last leg of the historic Artemis 1 mission, which launched from Florida Nov. 15.

The numbers are mind-boggling: The Orion capsule will hit Earth’s atmosphere flying at speeds of almost 25,000 mph (or about 11 kilometers per second) and experience temperatures nearing 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit in the process.

Iain Boyd is a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences who has spent his career studying hypersonics, or vehicles that travel far faster than the speed of sound. He also leads a $15 million NASA institute called the Advanced Computational Center for Entry System Simulation (ACCESS). This effort investigates new ways to protect spacecraft as they undergo the extremes of entering atmospheres on Earth, Mars and beyond.

He spoke about the conditions Orion can expect to face this weekend, and why the growing space tourism industry may require new kinds of spacecraft heat shields.

NASA is using a maneuver called a “skip entry” to slow down the Orion capsule. What does that mean?

Iain Boyd

The alternative to a skip entry is a direct entry—just coming straight into Earth’s atmosphere and going down. In a skip entry, you come into the atmosphere at a shallower angle, then you skip back out into space and come back in again. It's kind of like when you skip stones on a lake. It's a way of decelerating without getting into the heating right away. It also provides more flexibility on where the capsule will land.

Right away. Even with those maneuvers, Orion is going to face blistering conditions Sunday. What can we expect to happen?

When you fly very rapidly through air or any other gas, the gas itself gets heated up. It’s like the friction when you rub your hands together. In this case, when you’re coming back from the moon at those velocities, the temperatures of the gases are higher than the surface temperature of the sun—many, many thousands of degrees.

Orion isn’t carrying any human crewmembers on this mission. But it will in the future. How will NASA keep them safe from that kind of heat?

Unlike airplanes, hypersonic vehicles, including capsules, have what's called a thermal protection system. Usually, it’s a collection of different materials that cover the outside of the vehicle to ensure that that heat is kept out.

Artemis uses what we call an ‘ablating’ thermal protection system. This is material that, by design, disintegrates under heat and comes apart atom by atom—but in a controlled, well-understood way. As it disintegrates, those atoms carry energy and heat away from the vehicle.

That strategy is pretty similar to what NASA did during the Apollo era. Are scientists also exploring new ways of protecting spacecraft on reentry?

One of the highlights of the ACCESS institute is that we’re going to analyze NASA’s upcoming Mars Sample Return mission, which is scheduled for later this decade.

NASA is going to fly to Mars, land a rover on the surface, scoop up some Martian dirt and rock and fly all the way back. That capsule will enter Earth's atmosphere at about 14 kilometers per second. The Orion spacecraft will be moving at around 11 kilometers per second. Fourteen kilometers per second doesn't sound like a big jump, but it turns out to be a different physics regime. We’re going to need different materials and a different kind of heat shield.

How would those new heat shields work?

Some of the approaches that are being studied are what are called woven materials. You begin by weaving together fibers made of carbon, and then you inject material into the gaps between the fibers. It sounds low tech, but it's actually very high tech.

The fibers themselves will still ablate. But when the chemicals that are injected in between the fibers heat up, they will break down and become gas. That gas flows from inside the heat shield to out, creating additional cooling effects

As the space tourism industry grows, we’re going to be seeing a lot more spacecraft launch from Earth—and, hopefully, come back. What kinds of issues will that raise?

One of the key challenges for a successful space economy is going to be more efficient vehicles and more efficient heat shields. And that is going to require us to better understand all of these physical and chemical processes. Every single layer we can shave off our heat shield because we're confident that we don't need it is going to increase the efficiency of bringing stuff back from space.

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