Description: The Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI) campaign includes an Engineering Science Investigation (ESI) called Venus InStrumentation for Thermophysics and Aerosciences (VISTA). This investigation is intended to provide entry, descent, and landing, scientific data that will be available to inform future NASA missions. The DAVINCI spacecraft is being designed to accommodate this ESI. VISTA will provide key data of post-flight aerothermodynamic data and performance analyses about the DAVINCI’s forebody thermal protection system (TPS). NASA’s Ames Research Center (ARC) leads the VISTA development effort. NASA ARC will provide project management, Principle Investigator, and systems engineering to support the effort. Through the ARC STAR (Sensors TPS Advanced Research Laboratories) Labs the required thermal plugs will be fabricated with thermocouples installed for delivery to Lockheed for integration into the DAVINCI heatshield. The STAR Labs will also procure the backshell Schmidt-Boelter total heat flux radiometer. The VISTA project will conduct a relevant ground test campaign to demonstrate do-no-harm to the DAVINCI heatshield. This test campaign will include vibration, shock, thermal vacuum, and arc jet testing for the various test articles as applicable. The VISTA project also includes aerosciences, and material response engineering analysis for several purposes. The aersociences effort supported by LaRC will provide heating, and shear environments for materials scientists to propogate into the thermal plug materials. This will allow for the selection of appropriate thermocouple and locate their depths for the ground testing and flight phases. The aerosciences effort will include prediction of backshell radiation at the radiometer location during the highest heating rates during entry.

Benefits: Supports confirmation of expanding the state-of-the-art for Carbon-Carbon heatshields in extreme atmospheric planetary and Earth entry environments. This is also a rare opportunity to to evaluate risk of SOA heatshield design and implementation with ground-to-flight traceability. The traceability is a chain of ground based materials design, fabrication, CFD, and qualification all evaluated by entry flight data analysis. The flight data is used to assess performane of a complete set of ground based design tools and methodologies in disparate fields of engineering and science. These same ground based methodologies are also used for Human Spaceflight during Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) at Earth, and in the future, at Mars. Evaluating of these tool sets will naturally support their evolution to benefit future generations of missions. This evolution of methodologies will further NASA's ability to to characterize and quantify risk of perfomance for a family of atmospheric entry profiles accomodating flexibility in mission design.