Speaker
Description
According to international safety guidelines the on-ground casualty risk of a re-entering object shall not exceed 1 in 10,000. The casualty expectancy can be reduced in two ways (1) by selecting a suitable impact area and population density within, or (2) by reducing the casualty area of the surviving fragment. Due to the high cost associated with a controlled re-entry the latter option has attracted alot of attention. The fragments which survive are often from recurring spacecraft components (such as Propellant tanks, Reaction wheels, Solar array drive mechanisms, Magnetorquers, etc.), therefore the interest of applying designs which increase the demisability of these components is high. In the frame of ESA’s activity “High Fidelity Re-Entry Simulations on Critical Spacecraft Platform Equipment”, HTG conducted detailed SCARAB simulations in order to assess the breakup and demise behavior of solar array drive mechanisms (SADMs) and, together with the manufacturer, identified feasible design for demise options and evaluated their impact on the causalty risk.
