Hot property! A Reentry Breakup Recorder is onboard ATV headed for fiery fall into a zone of Pacific Ocean. Credit: The Aerospace Corporation
Update:
First word post-reentry of the ATV is that this experiment failed to phone home! An analysis is underway to determine what happened to the device. Meanwhile, data from the successful test of this device from the March reentry is ongoing and promises to provide insight into the reentry process. – LD
Now undocked from the International Space Station is Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), dubbed the Johannes Kepler. Its departure from ISS today leads to its destructive plunge tomorrow into Earth’s atmosphere.
The 10-ton Johannes Kepler was built by the European Space Agency. This supply vehicle will make a targeted, fiery fall into a zone of Pacific Ocean.
While the huge ATV is loaded with leftover rubbish from the ISS, it also carries a unique recording device: A Reentry Breakup Recorder – or REBR for short.
REBR will gather measurements on the location, temperature, pressure and attitude of the ATV’s breakup before the device freefalls on its own though the atmosphere. As it dives toward the ocean, the recorder will transmit the gathered reentry information via the Iridium satphone system.
Scientists will later analyze the collected information to study the reentry process of space hardware.
Micro-technology
REBR is made possible by micro-instruments, that is, tiny sensors and tiny cell phone technology – a satellite phone with a heat shield!
This is not the first fall taken by REBR. Similar hardware took a high dive into Earth’s atmosphere last March courtesy of Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV-2).
“We got excellent acceleration and rate data through the breakup of the HTV-2 and are just completing the analysis,” noted William Ailor, Director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California.
REBR is a product of The Aerospace Corporation, with major funding provided by Aerospace, the U.S. Air Force, as well as NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The heat shield was provided by The Boeing Company and NASA’s Ames Research Center provided in-kind support of the self-stabilizing heat shield design.
By Leonard David