“…The stagnation point conditions corresponding to a given spacecraft entry are reproduced for several minutes and the plasma flow carries sufficient energy to reproduce actual aerothermal loads experienced by a thermal protection system (TPS) in flight. Thanks to a flow of high chemical purity, plasmatron facilities are particularly suited to study gas/surface interaction phenomena for reusable TPS materials [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] or composite ablative material [12] . High-temperature experiments enable characterizing the catalytic properties of the tested TPS sample by combining direct measurements using various diagnostics and a numerical reconstruction based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.…”