Students test compact reentry glider to advance hypersonic research
Part of their senior capstone course, HEDGE represents a bold attempt to validate whether miniature spacecraft like CubeSats can effectively transmit reentry data for use in larger-scale hypersonic designs. The glider, roughly a foot long, will attempt to achieve hypersonic speeds by exploiting the rocket's high-altitude drop, then reentering Earth's atmosphere while transmitting real-time environmental readings.
"The cost savings, if the students prove their concept, could be in the multiple millions of dollars per test flight," said Christopher Goyne, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of UVA's Aerospace Research Laboratory.
Goyne emphasized the challenge of acquiring hypersonic data today, which often requires either resource-intensive wind tunnel experiments or advanced simulations. HEDGE could offer an affordable, reusable alternative.
The mission profile is tight: the HEDGE vehicle must eject within one second after reaching peak altitude, deploy stabilizing fins, and achieve flight stability within ten seconds. The craft uses a CubeSat, not for orbital deployment but to house sensors that will measure temperature, pressure, and position data every half-second during the roughly 5.5-minute descent. Data will be relayed via radio to an orbiting satellite and downlinked to Earth.
"We sometimes think of gliders as slow, but in this case, it will be anything but," said Luke Dropulic, a NASA intern and one of the 13 UVA students behind the project.
The design has evolved from previous student efforts, refined for the unique conditions of NASA's RockSat-X program. Each deck of the RockSat-X rocket can accommodate experiments under 30 pounds, and HEDGE has been engineered to fit within these constraints.
Team members organized themselves by aerospace discipline, simulating an industry-style division of labor. Project manager Sydney Bakir, also an intern at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, highlighted the complexity and collaboration involved: teams covered areas like structural design, avionics, power and thermal management, flight stability, and communications.
"HEDGE has many complex parts that make it possible, and all of those parts are represented by students exhibiting their subject matter expertise," Bakir noted.
With NASA's final approval pending, the students are preparing to demonstrate the robustness of their integrated systems. Success hinges on HEDGE's ability to operate autonomously and communicate data back to UVA.
"The successful communication of data from space to UVA will prove the experiment worked," Dropulic said. He added that the findings could be scaled to support the development of full-size hypersonic vehicles, potentially offering better reliability than current simulation-based approaches.
Related Links
UVA Aerospace Research Laboratory
Rocket Science News at Space-Travel.Com
