ESA’s experimental reentry vehicle passed its milestone descent and landing test on Wednesday at the Poligono Interforze Salto di Quirra off the east coast of Sardinia in Italy.

The full-scale Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) prototype was released from an altitude of 3000 m by a helicopter, falling to gain speed to mimic a space mission before parachute deployment. The parachute slowed IXV for a safe splashdown in the sea at a speed below 7 m/s.

This last step in a series of tests shows that IXV can be recovered safely after its mission into space.

The IXV project is developing and flight-testing the technologies and systems for Europe’s future autonomous atmospheric reentry vehicles.

It will be launched by ESA next year on Vega, Europe’s new small launcher, into a suborbital path. It will reenter the atmosphere as if from a low-orbit mission, testing new European reentry technologies during its hypersonic and supersonic flight phases.

Previous campaigns included several water impact tests at CNR–INSEAN, a marine-engineering research institute in Rome, Italy. An instrumented subscale prototype was released at various angles and speeds to assess the best configuration for minimum impact loads.

At the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, USA, the multistage supersonic parachute was qualified up to the opening of the main subsonic stage.