Speaker
Description
In recent years, there has been an increased focus on the environmental impacts of all things in our daily lives. With a focus on the European industry: space exploration and space proliferation has been seeing a ramp-up to a more sustainable and more responsibly targeted set of guidelines and standards to facilitate this.
With many research and development activities underway that are aiming to achieve the Zero Debris targets set for LEO by 2030, there has been a noticeable increase of interest from within the industry to achieve the goals laid out by ESA. Controlling the levels of space debris has become a greater focus of both industry and institutions alike; especially given the volume of spacecraft expected to be launched in the foreseeable future.
Specifically, regarding Design for Demise, there have been a multitude of studies and projects that have been conducted in order to gain better understanding of re-entry processes and to assure that more spacecraft fragments demise during re-entry manoeuvres. Yet, substantial knowledge gaps on the demise and fragmentation processes of various components, units, and designs remain to be closed.
The objective of this discussion is to highlight some of the many research opportunities that don’t just benefit the European lead systems integrators (LSIs), but ideally that benefit all of the European industry at large, and to highlight some potential areas of collaboration for mutual benefit for all actors within the industry.
