Conveners
Plasma facilities, simulations and diagnostics: Tuesday morning 1
- Chris James (The University of Queensland)
Plasma facilities, simulations and diagnostics: Tuesday morning 2
- Chris James (The University of Queensland)
Plasma facilities, simulations and diagnostics: Thursday afternoon 2
- Louis Walpot (ESA/TEC-MPA)
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Daisy-May Joslyn (The University of Queensland)22/09/2026, 09:00Radiation Modeling and Simulation
The ice giants, Uranus and Neptune, are the least explored planets in our solar system. Voyager 2 conducted a brief flyby of Uranus in 1986, before reaching Neptune, but the visit provided incomplete data and left many phenomena unexplained. As such, a larger-scale return mission, named the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP), was designed to perform a multi-year orbit and deploy a probe into the...
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Marco Panesi (University of California, Irvine)22/09/2026, 10:00Plasma Facilities, Simulations and Diagnostics
Inductively coupled plasma (ICP) wind tunnels such as the VKI Plasmatron and the Plasmatron X at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign reproduce the enthalpy and pressure of atmospheric entry for material testing. Characterizing the plasma they deliver is difficult: probes perturb the flow, spectroscopic and laser diagnostics are demanding, and each measurement returns one quantity at a...
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Devin Merrell (Stanford University)22/09/2026, 11:00Plasma Facilities, Simulations and Diagnostics
Background
The validation of new collisional-radiative models for the excitation and ionization of air requires quantitative measurements of the different excited and ionized species present in re-entry and hypersonic-relevant flows. Such measurements behind shock waves have been difficult, owing to the rapid timescales of the formation and decomposition of excited atoms, molecules, and...
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Gilles Courret (HEIG-VD)22/09/2026, 11:30Plasma Facilities, Simulations and Diagnostics
Background of the study
A few years ago, the HES-SO team completed an ESA/OSIP project which indicated that our 1 kW pulsed microwave sulphur lamp can produce plasmas exhibiting significant similarities to weakly ionised molecular hypersonic plasmas encountered during the intense heat phase of shuttle atmospheric entry [1]. In particular, the wall temperature of the bulb reaches values...
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Takeaki Muramatsu (Tokyo Metropolitan University)24/09/2026, 16:30Plasma Facilities, Simulations and Diagnostics
Background
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Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) aerobraking is a promising active thermal protection method for atmospheric re-entry. The Lorentz force generated by the interaction between the ionized shock layer and an applied magnetic field increases the shock standoff distance. This increase reduces the wall heat flux and augments drag through the reaction force [1]. Previous demonstration tests... -
Dr Bruno Lopez (Metacomp Technologies Inc.)Radiation Modeling and Simulation
Background of the study
During atmospheric entry, the interaction of the dissociated, thermochemically non-equilibrium boundary-layer gas with the vehicle surface strongly influences the wall composition, the surface heat flux, and both the convective and radiative heating experienced by the thermal protection system (TPS). Surface catalycity governs the recombination of atomic species...
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Andrea Fagnani (ORAU at NASA Ames Research Center)Plasma Facilities, Simulations and Diagnostics
Background
The Electric Arc Shock Tube (EAST) at NASA Ames Research Center produces incident shock waves for validation and improvement of non-equilibrium chemical kinetics and radiation models relevant to atmospheric entry flows. The main experimental technique employs four spectrometers, capable of measuring spatially resolved emission spectra of the radiating gas from the vacuum...
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