Press release
34KB
febbraio 24, 2016 - European Space Agency
Simulated satellite reentries offering safety insights
Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale.
Press release available only in original language.
24 February 2016
It’s not often that space engineers get to practice destroying satellites, but a team came together at ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands to simulate and analyse just that – the culmination of a 14-month ‘design for demise’ project.
New space debris mitigation regulations demand future space missions have a less than one in 10 000 chance of someone on the ground being hit by debris originating from their mission.
The most straightforward solution would be performing controlled re-entries into empty stretches of ocean – except that achieving this turns out to need significantly more propellant than all a satellite would employ over its entire lifetime, so would require a larger satellite and a bigger, more costly class of launcher.
The best alternative is to design and build satellites in such a way that they would burn up in the atmosphere, known as ‘design for demise’ (D4D). Space manufacturers, working with ESA’s Clean Space initiative – tasked with safeguarding both terrestrial and orbital environment –have been investigating this, as part of a larger programme called CleanSat.
“Clean Space asked industry to assess all D4D techniques and see what effects they would have on the different areas of spacecraft design, such as structures, propulsion, power, orbital control and so on,” said Luisa Innocenti, heading Clean Space.
“The results of these studies were presented in two-day long sessions at the Concurrent Design Facility, attended both by representatives from Europe’s space industry and ESA’s Directorates.”
The Concurrent Design Facility, based at ESA’s ESTEC technical centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, is equipped with networked software tools to enable disparate specialists to work together on a single design in real time.
The D4D studies identified critical items in satellite designs most likely to survive re-entry, such as titanium propellant tanks, reaction wheels, optical payloads and balance masses.
Information on the key factors influencing the survivability of each item was also provided – these include not only the material it is made from and its mass but its geometry, wall thickness and position within the satellite, which influence its overall heat exposure due to potential shielding effects from other satellite elements.
Many solutions were proposed ranging from substituting materials to relocating items to places where they will receive more heating earlier in the re-entry process – and even triggering a partial breakup of the satellite structure during re-entry to guarantee demise.
Tiago Soares of ESA’s CleanSat programme explained: “All these D4D techniques were assessed in terms of their system level impact – meaning how will they change the overall satellite design and performance? Software tools were used to assess their effectiveness in terms of demisability.”
Finally these D4D solutions were applied – both individually and in combination – to actual ‘reference’ space missions, in this case the Earth-observing Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, serving to identify valuable guidelines and areas requiring further investigation.
“The topic is highly complex, and ESA really is the world leader,” added Friederike Beyer, assisting on the study. “This creates exciting technical discussions, although often it can be hard to come to conclusions with ultimate clarity!
“The results showed D4D techniques can provide real improvements, but further work on both demisable elements and re-entry software tools will be needed to reach our goal.”
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Artist_s_view_of_ATV-5_reentry
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CleanSat
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D4D_ATV_Reentry
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