Ballistic Performance Model of Crater Formation in Monolithic, Porous Thermal Protection Systems

Porous monolithic ablative systems insulate atmospheric reentry vehicles from reentry plasmas generated by atmospheric braking from orbital and exo-orbital velocities. Due to the necessity that these materials create a temperature gradient up to several thousand Kelvin over their thickness, it is important that these materials are near their pristine state prior to reentry. These materials may also be on exposed surfaces to space environment threats like orbital debris and meteoroids leaving a probability that these exposed surfaces will be below their prescribed values. Owing to the typical small size of impact craters in these materials, the local flow fields over these craters and the ablative process afford some margin in thermal protection designs for these locally reduced performance values. In this work, tests to develop ballistic performance models for thermal protection materials typical of those being used on Orion are discussed. A density profile as a function of depth of a typical monolithic ablator and substructure system is shown in Figure 1a.