11th International Workshop on Radiation of High Temperature Gases for Space Missions

Session

State to state and Collisional Radiative Modelling

21 Sept 2026, 17:50

The Angevin Castle (Mola Di Bari)

221. Assessment of the Quasi-Steady State approximation in a recombining Nitrogen / Argon plasma flow

Marco Carpanese (Laboratoire EM2C, CNRS UPR-288, CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay and Università degli Studi di Padova)

State to state and Collisional Radiative Modelling

1. Introduction

The radiative heat flux on a capsule during atmospheric re-entry represents a significant fraction of the total flux on the backshell, and depends on the population of the excited energy levels in the plasma around the capsule. This population does not follow a Boltzmann distribution due to non-equilibrium recombination in the afterbody region.
The Quasi-Steady State...

217. Quintet A'' CNN PESs for CN Excitation Studies

Eric Geistfeld (AMA Inc. @ NASA Ames Research Center)

State to state and Collisional Radiative Modelling

Background

Titan's atmosphere is composed mostly of N$_2$ with small amounts of CH$_4$, and so, shock layers around craft entering Titan's atmosphere will contain a variety of molecules formed from H, C, and N atoms, including the cyanogen radical CN. Analysis has shown that the radiative heat flux predicted by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of Titan...