Experimental and predicted pressure and heating distributions for an Aeroassist Flight Experiment vehicle in air at Mach 10

The Aeroassisted Flight Experiment vehicle for whose scale model pressure and heat-transfer rate distributions have been measured in air at Mach 10 is a 60-deg elliptic cone, raked off at a 73-percent angle, with an ellipsoid nose and a skirt added to the base of the rake plane to reduce heating. The predictions of both an inviscid flow-field code and a Navier-Stokes solver are compared with measured values. Good agreement is obtained in the case of pressure distributions; the effect of Reynolds number on heat-transfer distributions is noted to be small.