Related papers: Increasing Launch Efficiency with the PEGASUS Laun…

The most important part of a railgun launch package is the armature where the electromagnetic force is generated leading to the acceleration of the launch package. In case of metal armatures, the most commonly used armature types are the…

Railguns are capable to far exceed the muzzle energies of current naval deck guns. Therefore one of the most promising scenario for the future application of railguns in naval warfare is the long range artillery. Hypervelocity projectiles…

A DES railgun increases the launch efficiency when compared to a simple railgun setup. In a NGSPICE-simulation a DES and a simple railgun setup connected to an existing 10-MJ capacitor based power supply are compared. Important parameters…

The French-German Research Institute (ISL) has several railguns installed, the largest of these is the PEGASUS accelerator. It is a 6m long, 4x4 cm2 caliber distributed energy supply (DES) railgun. It has a 10 MJ capacitor bank as energy…

Railguns can convert large quantities of electrical energy into kinetic energy of the projectile. This was demon- strated by the 33 MJ muzzle energy shot performed in 2010 in the framework of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) electromag-…

Large railguns require powerful power supply units. At the French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis (ISL) most experimental railguns are driven by power supply units based on capacitors. Recent investigations at ISL explore the…

The hydrodynamic operation of the `Forest Flyer' type of explosive launching system for shock physics projectiles was investigated in detail using one- and two-dimensional continuum dynamics simulations. The simulations were insensitive to…

The choice of the launch vehicle is an important consideration during the preliminary planning of interplanetary missions. The launch vehicle must be highly reliable, capable of imparting sufficient energy to the spacecraft to inject it on…

Launching large (> 1 g) well-characterized projectiles to velocities beyond 10 km/s is of interest for a number of scientific fields but is beyond the reach of current hypervelocity launcher technology. This paper reports the development of…

The experimental study of the plasma projectile acceleration in the laser-induced cavity pressure acceleration (LICPA) scheme is reported. In the experiment performed at the kilojoule PALS laser facility, the parameters of the projectile…

A new idea for reusing rockets, based on the Energia 2 launch vehicle, using deployable wings is proposed. A mission design is planned with an expected maximum altitude of 500 m. Following that systems engineering was used to manage the…

Models applied on real time response task, like click-through rate (CTR) prediction model, require high accuracy and rigorous response time. Therefore, top-performing deep models of high depth and complexity are not well suited for these…

We investigated how a target's porosity affects the outcome of a collision, with respect to the impactor's fate. Laboratory impact experiments using peridot projectiles were performed at a speed range between 0.3 and 3.0 km/s, onto high…

Laser-accelerated lightsails enable new types of missions that are very different from the Breakthrough Starshot mission to the Centauri system that aims to send 1 gram of payload at 0.2 c. The present work widens the mission design space…

We report experimental results on the parameters, structure, and evolution of high-Mach-number (M) argon plasma jets formed and launched by a pulsed-power-driven railgun. The nominal initial average jet parameters in the data set analyzed…

The Starshot lightsail project aims to build an ultralight spacecraft ("nanocraft") that can reach Proxima Centauri b in approximately 20 years, requiring propulsion with a relativistic velocity of ~60 000 km/s. The spacecraft's…

We present a novel scheme for rapid quantitative analysis of debris generated during experiments with solid targets following relativistic laser-plasma interaction at high-power laser facilities. Experimental data indicates that predictions…

Identifying the optimal design of a new launch vehicle is most important since design decisions made in the early development phase limit the vehicles' later performance and determines the associated costs. Reusing the first stage via…

Material deformation and failure under impact loading is a subject of active investigation in space science and often requires very specialized equipment for testing. In this work, we present the design, operational analysis and application…

With the increased urgency to design fusion pilot plants, fast optimization of electron cyclotron current drive (ECCD) launchers is paramount. Traditionally, this is done by coarsely sampling the 4-D parameter space of possible launch…