ADVANCED MANEUVERING REENTRY VEHICLE INSTRUMENTATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUES

Abstract

This paper describes instrumentation and communications techniques used in the data gathering process for presently on going high performance advanced maneuvering reentry vehicle test flights. Transducers and signal conditioning design considerations including flight test results of vibration and acoustic data (gathered simultaneously by eight FM and one 24,824 sps PCM channel), nose and control surface load cells, control actuation, flow rates, control and aerodynamic pressures, heat shield in-depth thermocouples, nose recession (nuclear and acoustic) are discussed. Also presented are the instrumentation techniques used to verify the integrity of the RF subsystem in addition to a description of the PCM, Data Delay and FM video links.