23–25 Oct 2018
ESTEC
Europe/Amsterdam timezone

Initial Considerations for Re-entry Breakup Experiment

24 Oct 2018, 16:00
20m
Erasmus building (ESTEC)

Erasmus building

ESTEC

Keplerlaan 1, 2201 AZ Noordwijk, The Netherlands
Technologies for Space Debris Mitigation Space Debris Mitigation

Speaker

James Merrifield (Fluid Gravity Engineering)

Description

It is now well established that spacecraft manufacturers and launch
service providers have a duty of care to understand and mitigate the
ground casualty risk posed by their products such that this risk can be
demonstrably managed within acceptable levels. In order to achieve
this, an ability to determine the likely ground casualty risk that a
vehicle poses given its as-designed configuration and applicable
missions is required. Further, a design capability which enables design
changes to be implemented, which aim to ensure that system hardware
will fragment and demise in such a way as to mitigate ground casualty
risk, is highly desirable. These types of assessments rely heavily on
analysis, but ensuring robustness of the conclusions drawn from basic
physical understanding, limited ground testing and a small number of
existing flight observations is only tentatively achievable, and could
be significantly enhanced by a carefully conceived flight experiment or
set of experiments. This presentation provides some initial
considerations for the design of such an experiment. These include:
choice of target (launcher vs spacecraft), experiment type
(phenomenological, quantitative or remote observation) and host type
(sub-scale, full-scale or even real-mission). The pros and cons of a
number of initial concepts have been preliminary examined in
preparation for a systematic trade and feasibility assessment.

Primary authors

James Merrifield (Fluid Gravity Engineering) James Beck (Belstead Research Ltd) Adam S. Pagan (Institute of Space Systems, University of Stuttgart) Prof. Georg Herdrich (IRS) Dr Hendrik Weihs (DLR) Dr Christian Dittert (DLR)

Presentation materials