
aerocapture
Sign in to savethumb|500px|Schematic showing the various phases of the aerocapture maneuver. Atmospheric height is greatly exaggerated for clarity.
~15 min read
Encyclopedic overview
12 sectionsContents
- Brief History of Aerocapture
- Benefits of aerocapture
- Aerocapture spacecraft designs
- Blunt body, rigid aeroshell design
- Deployable or Inflatable aeroshell design
- Trailing ballute design
- In practice
- In fiction
- Related methods
- Software
- See also
- References
thumb|500px|Schematic showing the various phases of the aerocapture maneuver. Atmospheric height is greatly exaggerated for clarity.
Aerocapture is an orbital transfer maneuver in which a spacecraft uses aerodynamic drag force from a single pass through a planetary atmosphere to decelerate and achieve orbit insertion.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “aerocapture” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.