IXV spacecraft returned to Earth

On February 11, the European Space Agency (ESA) conducted successful tests of an autonomous IXV (Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle) spacecraft.

The launch was carried out from the Kourou space center in French Guiana at 13.40 GMT. The drone successfully separated from the Vega launch vehicle at 15.59 at an altitude of 333 km, then climbed to an altitude of 412 km, flew over the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, Asia, carried out a braking maneuver and began to descend.

The wedge-shaped apparatus planned in the atmosphere before releasing a parachute and landing in the Pacific Ocean about 3000 km west of the Galapagos Islands. The flight took about 100 minutes.
')


Balls with air kept the device until the arrival of the evacuation vessel.



Such devices in the future may perform transportation, says ESA. For several hours they are able to deliver the goods to a given point on the globe. Research is being conducted in the framework of the international program PRIDE (Program for Reusable In-Orbit Demonstrator for Europe).

The wedge-shaped spacecraft is approximately the size of a truck: 5.5 m long and 2.2 wide. All - 0.5 tons without cargo, 1.9 tons with cargo.



The underside is covered with a protective layer of carbon fiber panels woven into the ceramic matrix. One of the main goals of yesterday’s experiment was to check how the bottom coverage behaves when entering the atmosphere (at an altitude of 120 km, the vehicle’s speed was 7.5 km / s). For this, more than 300 sensors were built into it. Engineers will soon remove them and analyze the evidence.

By the way, along with IXV successfully coped with the test and lightweight 30-meter launch vehicle Vega, for which it was only the fourth launch. The maximum payload of this rocket is 2 tons. The carrier can bring satellites into a polar orbit 700 km high. The estimated cost of the launch is $ 4-5 million.



Design, manufacturing and related work on the IXV project cost € 150 million. The project involved 40 European enterprises. The Vega project budget is € 700 million (seven countries participate, 65% of the budget falls to Italy).