BFS an atmospheric reentry kit to bring NANOSAT Payloads Back From Space ,
Creators: name:  STEPHANE HEINRICH 
Publisher: name: Proceedings of the Aerospace Europe Conference - EUCASS - CEAS - 2023
Year: 2023
Subjects: ATMOSPHERIC
REENTRY
KIT
NANOSAT
PAYLOAD

description: The atmospheric reentry technologies have not evolved significantly since the early days of space exploration. Mostly they were designed for manned spaceflight applications allowing humans to return safely to Earth in a capsule or shuttle-like vehicle. Those applications have all the drawbacks that return vehicles whose shapes were constrained by launch phase restrictions (cross-section of the capsule or of the heat shield under fairing, aerodynamic shape of the shuttle). The next generation of reentry systems intends to disrupt this constraint with the deployment of a larger heatshield via an inflatable or deployable heatshield composed of flexible or textile thermal protection systems. If those concepts are not completely new and have already been intended in the past more than 2 decades ago, their implementation on operational applications seems to be finally underway. (H2020 EFESTO, NASA ADEPT, ... ). The trends forNEWSPACE and for GREENSPACE for a more industrial and sustainable use of space have reactivated the interest in reusable systems and recovery of elements from space in a more innovative manner (in-orbit manufacturing and production, short-time recovery of experiments out of ISS resupply cargo 6-month routine.) Due to its past experience in reentry topics coming from past activities in Design for Demise in a research entity of the AL TRAN Company, the e.NOVA start-up was created by his founder to promote this legacy and top-listed this project BFS \"Back from Space\" as a main initial objective and initiated a consortium with industrial textile and composite developers, shape memory alloy provider, thermo-mechanical and computational fluid dynamics analysts. This paper intends to present the state of the art on this thematic and the initial progress status of this internal project funded by French \"Plan de Relance\" promoting F-TPS (flexible thermal protection system) as an \"Innovative Technology for NANOSAT industry\". 1. State of the Art With the explosion of the use of CubeSats, satellites have become smaller, lighter, and cheaper. This means that the instruments and experiments onboard are able to follow the same trend. Making an instrument space-ready while miniaturizing it and making it cheaper is now accessible, allowing the option to bring samples back to Earth for Newspace\'s actors. Consequently, the BFS was defined as an atmospheric reentry kit developed for CubeSats and Nanosats to allow them to reenter the atmosphere safely in order to deliver their payload to the ground. Nowadays, some projects have proposed and developed similar approaches to what the BFS project is searching. HASA/U.!A 2000 2002 2003 2004 2014 2017 2020 Figure 1. LOFTID Injlatahle Heat Shield I Figure 2. NAS\'.4 HEART concept Historically, the IRDT based on a Russian inflatable design has been experimented in Europe with few success early 2000\' s . Later on, NASA initiated a lot of researches on a similar inflatable design with led to suborbital demonstration (IRVE-2,3). The upgraded design HEART[2][3] was assumed to be able to reenter an entire ISS Module Copyright 2023 by First Author. Posted online by the EU CASS association with permission.