Three years of their hard work plunged in the Atlantic Ocean on a Monday in July and a group of NASA engineers could not have been more thrilled.
They were part of the Inflatable Reentry Vehicle Experiment (IRVE-3) team that is working to develop an inflatable heat shield. The technology could be used to protect spacecraft when entering a planet's atmosphere or returning here to Earth.
A 64-foot, 22-inch (19.5 meters, 56 centimeters) diameter Black Brant XI sounding rocket launched the IRVE-3, encased in a nose cone, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore. The rocket with the inflatable on board shot 288 miles (463.5 kilometers) up, and IRVE-3 and its payload were ejected into the atmosphere. The technology demonstrator inflated and fell back to Earth, cameras and temperature and pressure sensors monitoring its performance all the way down. After a total of 20 minutes, from launch to splash down, it landed in the Atlantic about 100 miles (161 kilometers) East of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
Also: Learn about a heat shield employing thermal protection material blocks.
