US company Ballistic Recovery Systems (BRS) is to provide a parachute for around $40,000 for the Italian aerospace research center, CIRA's, balloon dropped transonic flight tests using its unmanned space vehicles (USV), scheduled for early 2008.
Launched from the Italian air force base in Sardinia, the USV will climb to an altitude of 24km (15 miles) to 40km with its cargo of scientific equipment by balloon and then be released.
The USV will execute a programmed trajectory, comparable with the last part of a spaceflight re-entry trajectory, with transitions through supersonic, transonic and subsonic regimes. The BRS parachute system will deploy for a splashdown and subsequent recovery at sea.
"CIRA was looking for an off-the-shelf solution to replace a previous recovery system within the programmatic requirements of the unmanned space vehicle programme. We are in the process of making slight modifications to the system's deployment configuration and the parachute container to fit the required conditions. The parachute canopy technology used on existing manned-aircraft programmes will be pulled off the shelf with no modifications at all," said BRS engineering vice-president, Frank Hoffmann.
CIRA's USV - called Castore - made its first flight on 24 February, when it was released from its stratospheric balloon flying over the Italian armed forces' Salto di Quirra test range in Sardinia. CIRA is funding the remainder of the USV programme, although Giovanni Bignami, president of both CIRA and the ASI Italian space agency, has decided ASI will no longer be involved.
Source: FlightGlobal.com