Speaker
Description
Ali Gülhana*, Thorn Schleutker a^, Patrik Seltnera, Pawel Goldyna, Niklas Wendela
a German Aerospace Center DLR
* Corresponding Author
^ Presenting Author
Abstract
The German Arospace Center DLR, one of the world’s most renown research institutions in the aerospace field, is committed to making the economy and society sustainable. For this purpose, DLR researches technologies that lead to higher efficiencies and new and sustainable solutions in aviation, space, energy and transportation. DLR also acts as the German Space Agency, so there obviously is an interest in sustainable space flight reaching from the design and manufacturing of spacecraft and rockets, over space operations and to disposal of spacecraft at the end of their mission. This interest culminated a research project called TEMIS-DEBRIS (Technologien für Mitigation von Space Debris). In this presentation, we will give an overview of the project, the current status and the tasks planned for the upcoming years.
The project focuses on removal of spacecraft with an uncontrolled re-entry at the end of the process. For this purpose, technologies for efficient post-mission disposal compliant with the current 5-year rule are addressed in terms of passive and semi-passive solutions. As the uncontrolled entry flight comes at the cost of potentially having surviving debris fall down over inhabited areas, novel approaches for designing spacecraft for enhanced demisability are investigated. This includes various concepts for thermally trigged demisable joints, technologies that improve the demisability of materials and components and composites with inherent increased demisability. Furthermore, both experimental and numerical tools for the design and analysis of fully demisable satellites are driven forward to improve the simulation capabilities and understanding. Ultimately, the design of a demonstrator flight mission for fully demisable satellite is sketched in the project. The broad scope of the project is possible as different institutes from within the DLR joined forces using their exhaustive expertise, experience and experimental and numerical tools.
