A centre of excellence for aerospace systems, engineering consultancy and space systems development, specialising in entry, descent and landing systems for space vehicles.
It’s 2017 and our friends from DiscoveryCanada came to visit the team in the UK to film the Huygens 8m parachute for its 20- year launch anniversary, ably assisted by Team Vorticity. #huygens #cassinihuygens
Inflating the 8m Huygens Parachute
Team Vorticity’s Ground Crew: Steven Rogers, Aure Hugon and Marcus Collier-Wright
The landing site of the Schiaparelli module and the parachute can be seen in the latest pictures provided by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter.
The bright white object at the bottom of the image is believed to be the 12-m diameter parachute used to decelerate Schiaparelli after the initial heat shield entry. The parachute and the associated back shield were released from Schiaparelli prior to the final phase, during which its nine thrusters should have slowed it to a standstill just above the surface.
Initial indications are that the parachute system, which was designed and qualified by Vorticity, operated successfully.
The dark spot on the image is associated with the Schiaparelli module.
Picture copyright NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Tune into the updates from ESA’s space operations centre as the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter approaches and enters orbit around the Red Planet, and the Schiaparelli module lands on its surface.
This is a test version of the parachute that will slow the Schiaparelli entry, descent and landing module as it plummets through the Martian atmosphere on 19 October 2016.
When the module is about 11 km from the surface, descending at about 1700 km/h, the parachute will be deployed by a mortar. The parachute will slow the module to about 200 km/h by 1.2 km above the surface, at which stage it will be jettisoned.
The parachute is a ‘disc-gap-band’ type, as used for the ESA Huygens probe descent to Titan and for all NASA planetary entries so far. The full-scale qualification model, pictured here, was used to test the pyrotechnic mortar deployment and the strength of the parachute in the world’s largest wind tunnel, operated by the US Air Force at the * National Full-Scale Aerodynamic Complex in the Ames Research Center, California.
In June 2015, Vorticity will be flight testing six prototype Earth Return Capsules at the Swedish Space Centre in Kiruna, Sweden on behalf of the European Space Agency.
The capsules are candidates for returning scientific samples from asteroids, comets or Mars in future ESA missions. These missions require capsules which are stable throughout entry and descent without the need for a parachute.
Three candidate designs have been chosen: two are similar to the Japanese Haybusa asteroid sample return capsule and the third is based on the ESA Huygens probe.
The test will involve three stratospheric balloon flights. On each flight, two vehicles will be dropped from an altitude of 35 km above northern Sweden. A full-scale vehicle will replicate the final descent from Mach 0.8 of the flight design while a sub-scale version of the same design will test the shape at up to Mach 1.5 by first accelerating in an aerodynamic fairing before starting measurements.
The data will allow derivation of the aerodynamic properties of all three designs between Mach 1.5 and landing.