The European Space Agency’s Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) is set to be launched aboard a Vega rocket on Wednesday, the 11th February for a suborbital hop.
The flight will lift off from Kourou in French Guiana at exactly 13:00 UTC (08:00 EST). When the vehicle reaches 340 kilometres in altitude, which is expected to occur 18 minutes into the flight, the IXV will separate from the Vega rocket.
It is then expected to coast to a maximum height of around 420 kilometres, before beginning its descent back towards Earth. With an entry speed of 27,000 kph, the vehicle will experience the same conditions that a spacecraft from low Earth orbit would experience during re-entry.
The ESA hope to gain valuable knowledge thanks to this test flight, with data being taken throughout the re-entry process. The vehicle, aided with parachutes, will splashdown in the Pacific Ocean around 100 minutes after lift-off, and be retrieved by a recovering ship, named Nos Aries.
The European Space Agency hope to follow up the IXV mission with another unmanned space plane project named PRIDE. The mission aims to deploy a number of satellites before returning to Earth for a runway landing. However, the date has yet to be set on when this mission will occur.
The flight will lift off from Kourou in French Guiana at exactly 13:00 UTC (08:00 EST). When the vehicle reaches 340 kilometres in altitude, which is expected to occur 18 minutes into the flight, the IXV will separate from the Vega rocket.
It is then expected to coast to a maximum height of around 420 kilometres, before beginning its descent back towards Earth. With an entry speed of 27,000 kph, the vehicle will experience the same conditions that a spacecraft from low Earth orbit would experience during re-entry.
The ESA hope to gain valuable knowledge thanks to this test flight, with data being taken throughout the re-entry process. The vehicle, aided with parachutes, will splashdown in the Pacific Ocean around 100 minutes after lift-off, and be retrieved by a recovering ship, named Nos Aries.
The European Space Agency hope to follow up the IXV mission with another unmanned space plane project named PRIDE. The mission aims to deploy a number of satellites before returning to Earth for a runway landing. However, the date has yet to be set on when this mission will occur.