In hypersonic flight, an aircraft or spacecraft moves at least five times faster than the speed of sound—producing extreme heat that can push the craft beyond its physical limits. The difficulty and importance of protecting vehicles against those conditions were tragically illustrated in 2003 when slight damage to heat-shielding tiles caused the Space Shuttle Columbia to disintegrate while re-entering Earth's atmosphere.

A unique experimental facility at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will help ensure that such a tragedy is never repeated—and enable unprecedented new adventures in space exploration.

The Plasmatron X is the largest inductively coupled plasma wind tunnel in the United States.

More than 60% of the launches in 2020 resulted in one or more rocket parts making an uncontrolled reentry into the atmosphere. While thankfully no one was hurt by that debris, with the expected rise in rocket launches over the coming decade the chances of a casualty are increasing. A new study paints the picture of how current methods of assessing risk are inadequate and new steps need to be taken.

Rocketry is a complex business. A typical lunch will usually require multiple stages to get the payload into orbit. Most of the time everything goes well, with the individual stages designed to either burn up in the atmosphere or end up on an escape trajectory away from the Earth. But in 2020 alone, 60% of the launches to low Earth orbit ended up with at least one significantly sized rocket part simply abandoned in an uncontrolled orbit.

As more and more high-tech systems are exposed to the space environment, space weather prediction can provide better protection for these devices. In the solar system, space weather is mainly influenced by solar wind conditions. The solar wind is a stream of supersonic plasma-charged particles which will cause geomagnetic storms, affect short-wave communications, and threaten the safety of electricity and oil infrastructure when passing over the Earth.

Accurate prediction of the solar wind speed will allow people to make adequate preparations to avoid wasting resources. Most existing methods only use single-modality data as input and do not consider the information complementarity between different modalities.