Aerodynamics and Aeroheating of Primitive Shapes for Reentry Demise Analysis

The characterization of vehicle breakup and demise during atmospheric entry is necessary for reducing risks posed by objects reentering from space and conducting flight safety analyses. Many demising vehicle components and space debris can be modeled as primitive shapes, such as spheres, cuboids, cylinders, and rings. Present work surveys and develops parametric drag, lift, moment, and heating models of these primitive shapes based on computational fluid dynamic calculations and experimental data. Since these shapes lack aerodynamic stability and are expected to tumble during demise, the aerodynamic and aeroheating models are further simplified by spherically averaging over all flight attitudes. This paper completely describes all model forms and presents all model parameters required for subsequent reentry breakup simulations.