Mini-IRENE, a Successful Re-entry Flight of a Deployable Heatshield Capsule

This paper presents the results of the suborbital flight of the Mini-IRENE Flight Experiment (MIFE), flight demonstrator of the IRENE (Italian Re-Entry NacellE) technology, a variable-geometry re-entry capsule for Low-Earth Orbit payloads. A capsule equipped with a mechanically deployable heat shield was successfully launched with a VSB-30 suborbital rocket from the Esrange base in Sweden, achieving an apogee of 260 km, a peak deceleration of 12 g and surviving the landing with successful retrieval. A huge set of telemetry data was acquired, including GPS, attitude, temperature, pressure, acceleration measurements. The capsule showed aerodynamic stability at all flight regimes. The peaks of deceleration and dynamic pressure were higher than predicted, as if drag was lower than expected during supersonic descent, but the capsule successfully survived landing, validating the mechanical resistance of the design even after ground impact.