Atmospheric Model Effect on Flight Data Reconstruction: Application to the Early Phase of the IXV Reentry

Abstract

Recent work on the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) re-entry simulation in hypersonic rarefied regime highlighted several numerical and experimental key aspects for a satisfactory reconstruction of its aerothermodynamic flight data. Indeed, among the investigated sources of discrepancies, the atmospheric model uncertainty on the density estimation appeared as one of the major sources of error for the heat flux calculation. The initial investigation was based on the NRLMSISE-00 model of 2000 which was recently updated in the NRLMSIS 2.0 version of 2020. This last version incorporates major formulation changes and new measurements yielding significantly smaller densities for altitudes below 100 km. The present work therefore focuses on the impact of improving our knowledge of the atmospheric environment to reduce the error related to the numerical reconstruction of the heat flux.