  This work deals with a computational investigation on the small ballistic
reentry Brazilian vehicle SARA (acronyms for SAt\'elite de Reentrada
Atmosf\'erica). Hypersonic flows over the vehicle SARA at zero-degree angle of
attack in a chemical equilibrium and thermal non-equilibrium are modeled by the
Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method, which has become the main
technique for studying complex multidimensional rarefied flows, and that
properly accounts for the non-equilibrium aspects of the flows. The emphasis of
this paper is to examine the behavior of the primary properties during the high
altitude portion of SARA reentry. In this way, velocity, density, pressure and
temperature field are investigated for altitudes of 100, 95, 90, 85 and 80 km.
In addition, comparisons based on geometry are made between axisymmetric and
planar two-dimensional configurations. Some significant differences between
these configurations were noted on the flowfield structure in the reentry
trajectory. The analysis showed that the flow disturbances have different
influence on velocity, density, pressure and temperature along the stagnation
streamline ahead of the capsule nose. It was found that the stagnation region
is a thermally stressed zone. It was also found that the stagnation region is a
zone of strong compression, high wall pressure. Wall pressure distributions are
compared with those of available experimental data and good agreement is found
along the spherical nose for the altitude range investigated.
