The important test campaign performed in the CIRA Scirocco Plasma Wind Tunnel on behalf of Sierra Nevada Corporation - the US company entrusted with the development program of the NASA Dream Chaser - have been successfully completed.
The purpose of the test campaign was to check the resistance of the innovative materials coating the Dream Chaser to both high temperatures and high pressures, and so its capacity to protect the space vehicle during the critical phase of the re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. A battery of numerous run has been carried out starting from June to the end of July; different models of different materials have been subjected to a hypersonic load generated by Scirocco to reach the re-entry representative surface temperatures for about ten minutes each.
The CIRA facility has finally demonstrated its ability to react efficiently and robustly even in particularly long-time and highly demanding test campaigns.
The recent campaign represented an important step towards the development of the Dream Chaser, the first mission of which, in its cargo version, is scheduled for 2021.
