ESA will observe the crash of a space truck in the atmosphere of the Earth from inside the ship

As already mentioned on Habré, the ATV program, the launch of the ISS supply cargo ships from the European Space Agency, ends this year. The last of the agency’s ships, “Georges Lemaitre”, will be launched on July 26, 2014. Such ships are destroyed / burned in the Earth’s atmosphere on the way back from the ISS. So that the last of the ATV ships does not burn out in vain, the ESA is going to install an infrared camera that is protected from high temperatures.

In order to be in time for the launch of the ship, the project team had to work quite hard, and the monitoring system was developed in just 9 months. The camera is installed in a Reentry SatCom capsule and is capable of transmitting images from a ship to Earth by retranslating data to satellites, and from there to Earth.
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By the way, this camera is not the only one. There is also an optical camera from Japanese developers, i-Ball, as well as a system from NASA, called Re-entry Break-up Recorder.

“These different tools will complement each other,” explains Neil Murray, head of the project at ESA.


Infrared Camera and SatCom Protected Capsule

The camera will be placed inside a special capsule that can withstand temperatures up to 1500 degrees Celsius. To protect against temperature, it was decided to cover the spherical capsule SatCom with a heat-resistant ceramic coating. In addition to protection against temperature, scientists were faced with the task of overcoming interference from plasma that forms around the Earth falling in the atmosphere of the Earth. The data transmitted by the capsule from the ship must pass through any “window” in the plasma. If this does not happen, there is insurance.

The plasma cushion will disappear at about 40 kilometers above sea level, and the satellites will be able to detect the transmission from the capsule (it should survive the destruction of the ship without any problems), after which all data will be transmitted to Earth via a network of satellites.


ATV - schematic sectional view

The capsule has its own antenna, so that the data will be transmitted without problems. The transmission will be carried out via the Iridium satellites, this is a group of 70 units of satellites.

The ship should completely collapse at an altitude of 70-80 kilometers above sea level. The speed of the capsule at the same time will be about 7 kilometers per second. Scientists will be able to obtain complete information about the process of ship destruction, which will then come in handy when planning future spacecraft.

Via esa