Speaker
Description
The proliferation of space debris has become an escalating crisis, yearning an urgent need for comprehensive mitigation strategies. One prominent strategy for space debris mitigation involves the deliberate planning of space missions and post-mission disposal ensuring re-entry of spacecrafts into Earth's atmosphere. To ensure effective disposal, re-entry predictions through advanced atmospheric modeling and improved technologies need to be enhanced. In this work, we will present refined models on a spacecraft-oriented tool that allows to run multi-fidelity exo- and endo-atmospheric assessments. This cloud-based solution consists of 3 components:
-
Re•Propagate: This component encompasses the propagation of satellite state and attitude, as well as the propagation of
uncertainties for collision risks and consequences assessment. It
leverages the latest CPU-intrinsic parallelisation capabilities and
high-level multiprocessing capabilities by Ray to ensure optimal
performance. This component is designed to provide a
time-to-solution in the range of milliseconds to be integrated in a
design or operational loop, or to run massive collision risks
assessment over the entire lifetime of a satellite. -
Re•Entry: This component handles the prediction of the re-entry trajectory of satellites, including ablation and
fragmentation and is capable of yielding the number of fragments and
their ground footprint. Once again, it is designed to be embedded in
design and optimisation loops and therefore aims at a
time-to-solution of the order of tens of seconds. -
Re•CFD: This component is a high-fidelity multi-physics computational fluid dynamics simulation tool. It leverages a fast
rasterization algorithm based on video games and distributed memory
parallelization technologies to ensure optimal performance and
reduced time-to-solution. This tool is meant to be used in
pre-design or optimization framework of space vehicles to yield
accurate results of flow around re-entering objects, driving design
choices such as the thickness of a satellite shell to ensure total
demise.
The architecture of the software is designed to be modular and scalable, allowing for the addition of new services and capabilities as requires. The use of cloud-based services and microservices architectures ensures high availbaility and fault tolerance, providing a reliable and efficient system for users.
Overall, this work demonstrates how the platform proposed by Re CAE aims at democratizing access to lifecycle assessment and design-for-demise and at providing the tools to the many to go for the zero debris target as soon as possible !
