Heat shield under fire photo of the day for Aug. 26, 2026
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Sometimes, to accomplish your mission, you have to start a few fires.
What is it?
At the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (VKI) in Belgium, researchers put a heat shield to the test, blasting it with scorching-hot flames to see how it would handle the intense temperatures it would experience when reentering Earth’s atmosphere.
The heat shield is for Draco, a European Space Agency mission that is literally designed to go up in flames. Draco stands for the Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object. The mission will send a satellite to space and back to collect data on the scorching experience of reentering Earth’s atmosphere.
“Our biggest design challenge lies in meeting two contrasting requirements: having Draco disintegrate normally during reentry just like any average satellite, yet also recording the event and storing its data in a capsule that stays intact throughout, until the data can be transmitted safely,” Draco project manager Stijn Lemmens said in a statement.
Why is it incredible?
For decades, we have sent satellites, telescopes, landers, rovers and even humans to space. And we know that the missions that return to Earth are in for a rough ride home.
When reentering through Earth’s atmosphere, a spacecraft will experience extreme temperatures. And while some are designed to withstand the heat, others are meant to burn up.
But there has yet to be a spacecraft whose purpose is to be destroyed by Earth’s atmosphere so we can study it. That’s where Draco comes in. The mission will collect valuable data to help us better understand exactly how satellites burn up in our atmosphere.
While sending a satellite into orbit around Earth was once a novelty, today there are so many objects in orbit that companies are working to ensure that their probes can successfully burn up in our atmosphere so that they do not become dangerous space junk, orbiting until they collide with another object.
With Draco, researchers hope to better understand the process so that, when we want to send a satellite to its doom, we know what to expect.
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