IT SOUNDS like a recipe for frying a spacecraft to a crisp, but scientists in
Illinois reckon orbiting space probes will one day be able to fly into and out
of a planet’s atmosphere just like an aircraft—without burning up.
Using new trajectory-planning software they have developed, the researchers
say spacecraft will dip into a planet’s atmosphere, harness aerodynamic forces
to fly like an aeroplane, and then zip back into space, having steered into a
new orbital trajectory.
The idea is to save precious fuel, says Bruce Conway and his colleague
Kazuhiro Horie of the University of Illinois at…
