REMOS - Recession Monitoring System: Experiment Concept and Results of the Flight on REXUS 9

Abstract

REMOS stands for REcession MOnitoring System and is a student experiment launched on the REXUS 9 rocket in February 2011 from Kiruna. The goal of the REMOS project is to develop a system enabling in-situ measurements of the thickness of ablative heatshields of reentry vehicles by means of monitoring the material’s electric properties. The system is tested during atmospheric reentry of the REXUS rocket in order to prove its applicability to future ablative thermal protection systems based on conductive materials. REMOS electronics are sensing resistance, capacitance and temperature in the probe sections. When probe material is ablated due to high thermal loads, the electrical properties of the probe sections change, thus providing temporal and spatial information on material thickness. Video data of three cameras is used for validation of the sensor data being stored and transmitted directly to the ground station. The data gathered by the service system’s inertial measurement unit and GPS-receiver was evaluated to compute the inflow vector. In the present paper, the architecture and implementation of the REMOS flight experiment will be presented. The results from preflight tests, the launch campaign and post-flight analysis will be compared.