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Old 07-11-2015, 10:51 PM
DarkArts
Klaatu barada nikto

DarkArts is offline
 
Join Date: Dec 2014
Posts: 678
Well, at geosynchronous orbit, velocity relative to earth is not 0, it's 3.07km/s. Similarly at ISS orbit (~400km) speed is very high, actually, counter-intuitively, higher.

There is a "feathered entry" technique for a suborbital vehicles that can dissipate more energy early in thinner air, but that is well, well below orbital speed. It's mostly about the kinetic energy of orbit being dissipated through friction.

Letting a paper plane "out the hatch" of the ISS isn't going to achieve anything, though, as the plane will stay in orbit close to the ISS (drifting slowly away with whatever differential velocity it was given).

Edit: A 10g sheet of paper will have ~288kJ of kinetic energy to dissipate during reentry from an initial orbital velocity of 7600m/s. Paper's specific heat is 1.336 J/g, so without cooling, temperature rise will be 216,000 deg C. I don't know what the radiative/convective cooling will be (heat radiated away to space as it 'glows' while heat is also transferred to very thin air) but since everything else during re-entry can't cool itself anywhere near fast enough to stop getting white hot, I'm going to go with the paper plane temperature rise being extreme.

Last edited by DarkArts; 07-11-2015 at 11:08 PM.
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