Low-Intrusive Fiber Optic Plug for TPS Materials (FiberPlug)
Motivation
- Prior flight systems for ablative TPS system spectroscopy (Fire II) used a complex system of multiple windows to provide an optical path that was protected from reentry heating. Due to the weight and complexity of this system, this approach has not been retried on any flight system reentering at orbital velocities (>8 km/s).
- This concept embeds optical fibers in a stepwise fashion below the surface of a “plug” of ablative material within the ablative TPS. As the TPS burns off, new fibers are exposed.
Approach
- Plasma layer formation analysis and modeling
- Simulated reentry plasma testing of a single-fiber system in the plume of a microwave electrothermal thruster
Results
- Laboratory demonstration completed
