Preliminary Design of the Sensor Pod of a Hypersonic Reentry Flight Testbed

This paper outlines the main design considerations of a CubeSat-like, miniature re-entry vehicle, HyCUBE. that will serve as a versatile hypersonic flight test platform. HyCUBE’s proposed first mission aims to collect experimental measurements of the aerothermodynamic environment that vehicles moving at hypersonic speeds encounter during re-entry from low Earth orbit. The data to be collected will contribute to the improvement and validation of computational models. Numerical simulations were used to establish the aerodynamic characteristics of the proposed vehicle, to evaluate the heat-load such that the thermal protection system can be sized, and to guide sensor placement and selection. The direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) were used where applicable, as well as analytical tools for the vehicle’s computed trajectory. Preliminary designs for the form factor and sensor suite are proposed and discussed.