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© 2020 HyFAR-ARA – Design & development ClictoutDEV – Legal information
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During these 20 years of existence, the ARA association adressed several fields related to atmospheric reentry :
The present page of this website gives an overview of some remarkable accomplishments of this 20 years period.
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In year 2020, acknowledging the worldwide deep transformations of the atmospheric reentry field that occured since its foundation, the ARA association renewed its statutes and changed his name for HyFAR-ARA (which stands for Hypersonic Flight and Atmospheric Reentry –Association pour la Rentrée Atmosphérique)
Flagship event of the association’s life, the ARA Days permitted to gather hundreds of scientists and engineers coming from dozens of countries on the shore of Arcachon Bay to share a common passion of atmospheric reentry.
Each of the 5 editions came with its share of remarkable communications. We want to highlight some key dates among these 5 editions :
The ARA Days series paused in 2015. The association is presently working to revive this tradition of international conferences in the Aquitaine Region
These conferences have been organized with the support of Avantage Aquitaine
International conferences such as ARA Days allow to gather numerous scientists and engineers on a single place.
They are thus an extremely efficient way to share and relay their participants knowledge and competencies. The counterpart is their sometimes spanning over too much topics that prevents attendants to witness all interesting information presented. Plus they require preparation a long time before their occurrence and somewhat heavy logistics. Duration often up to 4 to 5 days may also cause a difficulty for some people to attend the conferences.
It thus appeared that workshops focused on very specific topics over shorter durations could be an interesting complement to large conferences.
The idea was the to offer the opportunity of deeper exchanges on their very specialties to scientists and engineers.
ARA thus decided to test this short workshop format in january 2015 on the subject of space debris. The outcome of two days of presentations and discussions was the identification of a certain number of high priority issues to solve and the derivation of recommendations for their assessment. These were officially presented during the fifth ARA Days in May 2015 (see the presentation below).
The good feedback we received after this first experiment led us to schedule a second edition in 2017. Addressing issues interesting more precisely professionals from Aquitaine Region area, the objective was to perform an inventory of the industrial and research ecosystem of the Region in the field of atmospheric reentry and to foster collaborative projects.
Other workshops are planned, with the intention to increase the number of editions between two important events such as the ARA Days.
Abundant and out of control debris in earth orbits is an increasing concern for space business, and induce satellites operators to tackle the problem with great care. France thus enforced the so called “law on space operations” (in french LOS : Loi sur les Opérations Spatiales) in year 2008.
This law makes mandatory to operators to discard their satellites from useful earth orbits once they have reached their life end. They can comply with this regulation by transfering satellites to far away “parking orbits”, or by destroying them through active transfer toward atmospheric reentry trajectories.
In that second case, operators must demonstrate that these reentries are safe for populations. This implies that the assessment of satellites breakdown and debris reentry be computed with high reliability physical and numerical models.
ARA in collaboration with CEA, the french atomic energy commission (which was then, and still is, member of ARA together with Airbus DS, Herakles Safran, Bordeaux University and Aquitaine Region), organized a workshop on this topic on 20-21 January 2015. This workshop took place at the “Institut Laser et Plasma” (Plasma and Laser Institute) in Le Barp (France), a town in the Bordeaux area.
This event gatherd over 50 participants from french industry, university and public institutions : Airbus DS (Toulouse, Bordeaux, Les Mureaux), CEA (Bordeaux and Le Ripault facilities), CNES (Toulouse, Paris), CNRS (Toulouse, Orléans), Herakles/SAFRAN (Bordeaux), DGA (Rennes), Bordeaux University, INRIA (Bordeaux facility), ONERA (Toulouse), University of Pau, and small industry representatives.
The conclusions of this workshop mays be found in the presentation below.
The objectives of this workshop were the following :
The HyFAR-ARA association joined the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA, Bordeaux center) and ONERA (Toulouse center, Multi-Physics Department for Energy) to organize on October 14 and 15, 2021 a seminar dedicated to hypersonic rarefied flows.
This seminar, which took place at ONERA’s Fauga-Mauzac experimental site, addressed the problem through about fifteen 30-minute presentations, leaving large periods of interactive exchanges which were much appreciated. Multiple aspects were considered: numerical methods, physical modeling, experimental studies.
Due to the COVID pandemic, the number of participants had to be limited. However, the thirty or so people present during the two days devoted to the seminar were able to appreciate for the first time in almost a year and a half the quality of the exchanges brought by the direct interactions with the various speakers.
All participants paid tribute to the work done by ONERA, both for the quality of the proposed program and for the excellent organization and friendliness of the two days.
The program of the two days and the summaries of the presentations are available below. For more information or to contact the organizers, please use this link: contact HERA
Without projects to support scientific research and technological developments, both may stop short quickly.
Ambitious programs are a powerful stimulus for innovation, and contribute to federate the teams engaged in their realization.
According to that, and since its very first days in business, one of the driving policies of the association has been the promotion of flight experiments.
As a consequence of this commitment, a research and technology program was initiarted in the frame of the Pre-X and EXPERT experimental flight vehicles.
Following HyFAR-ARA (then ADTMRA) association proposal, CNES (french space agency) and Aquitaine Region signed on October 22nd 2004 a protocol which allowed to fund studies on in flight diagnostics design for these two vehicles.
The objective of the Pre-X program was to design, develop and flight test a prototype of lifting body reentry vehicle.
EXPERT was a second experimental atmospheric reentry vehicle, more oriented towards scientific research.
The CNES-Aquitaine Region protocol engulfed part of Pre-X and EXPERT program tasks dedicated to the payloads design, more specificaly embarked instrumentation
Partners in the consortium created to complete the program :
This program, funded by CNES and Aquitaine Region (3.7M€), ended in 2005. Pre-X was followed by the IXV reentry vehicle, an ESA managed project directly derived from Pre-X. IXV succesfully flew in year 2015