Speaker
Description
The New Space era has enabled the development speed of space technology as it has never seen before. However, this exponential increment in technological maturity is accompanied by an increase in the generation of space debris, which poses a risk to the several satellites in orbit.
Space debris models allow us to simulate the space debris environment. They include more than 30,000 objects, with diameters above 5-10 cm, which can be tracked from ground and are maintained in catalogs by Space Surveillance Networks on Earth. For the millions of objects with lower diameters, which cannot be tracked using ground-based observations, statistical modeling is used. Space debris models rely on in-situ measurements in order to validate their estimations of the non-trackable debris populations.
The validation of the current models has been performed using measurement data from returned surfaces, like the returned solar arrays of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, the number of returned surfaces has been limited. Moreover, having a large catalog of impact events provides a high number of statistical data for model validation. This can be achieved by applying large detection surfaces to (a) observe a high rate of impact events and (b) to increase the possibility to observe impacts of larger particle sizes.
Therefore, addressing this situation, the ESA Activity “DSBDM” (Deployable Surface-Based Debris Monitoring) has the goal to study the feasibility of detecting the population of space debris in the submillimeter to 1-centimeter size region using a large deployable detection surface. . Impact information such as size, impact direction and impact velocity will be derived in order to validate and enhance space environment models and at the same time improve our knowledge and understanding of the space debris environment. This study is conducted by the consortium consisting of OHB Systems, etamax Space, HPS, and Politecnico di Milano University.
