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The Analysis of Space Debris and Micro-Meteoroid Impacts
Technical Paper
2001-01-2437
ISSN: 0148-7191, e-ISSN: 2688-3627
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English
Abstract
The increasing concern in the space debris to spacecraft, above all long-term missions as the international space station, has increased the demand of reliable analysis tools, raised from industry and agencies.
The improvement of environment models and hypervelocity impact predictions has increased the physical available knowledge to software designers.
The DEBRIS application of ESABASE is a software simulation tool to assess the number of impacts and the resulting damage from meteoroids and space debris particles to spacecraft in low Earth orbit for user specified mission parameters and shielding designs. The tool is based on existing environment flux and damage models. For space debris this includes the new NASA engineering model ORDEM 96. For meteoroids the models includes streams, directional effects and velocity distributions. Secondary ejecta are also modelled and it is possible for the user to define his own damage equations for the analysis. The tool uses a statistical approach and allows a fully 3-dimensional analysis. The main user specified input parameters for an analysis are: The spacecraft geometry and attitude, the mission parameters, the flux models to be used for meteoroids and space debris, the particle size and velocity range to be analysed, the shielding design and the damage class and equation. The main output parameters are: The number of impacts, the impact directions and velocities, the number of damage events (holes, craters, penetrations) and the probability of no damage.