afterbody

1. (nautical) The part of a vessel abaft midships.Examples: "After the diagonals are drawn in the plane of the projection, the ribbands may be laid down in the horizontal plane, and from thence all the other frames may be laid down in the plane of projection, in the very same manner that the horizontal ribbands and the frames for the afterbody were laid down."; "As well as could be judged by looking down through the water under the counters, there was no injury whatever to the afterbody of the ship."; "The extension of slender-body theory to account for the interaction of the afterbody with vortex sheets shed upstream has been carried out by Newman and Wu (1973) in the general case where the local lateral velocity of the body differs from the downwash of the trailing vortices."

2. (astronomy) A companion body that trails a satellite or spacecraft.

3. (astronautics) A section or piece of a launch vehicle, rocket, or spacecraft that enters the atmosphere unprotected behind the nose cone or other body that is protected for entry.Examples: "After two minutes of aerodynamic breaking — now some 400 kilometres below the entry interface, and with the probe having slowed to the speed of sound — a mortar was programmed to deploy the small drogue into the slipstream, and once the drogue had slowed the probe to 430 kilometres per hour the afterbody shield was to be released so that the 2.5-metre wide dacron main parachute could be deployed."; "However, turbulent flow along the vehicle afterbody can under some conditions produce a comparable or greater heat flux."