Deorbitation of Upper Stages dust v1.1

Abstract

A FORTRAN program was created to model the controlled de-orbit burn of a rocket upper stage. Four phases were implemented: an initial coast, an instantaneous, in-plane burn, the unpowered de-orbit trajectory (all modelled directly by the FORTRAN program) and the re-entry itself, starting at 120 km altitude (modelled by DRAMA). The program calculated the footprint for all resultant pieces of debris. The initial release of this program is described in [3]. This program, dust, was further developed to ease set-up, parametric studies and pre-processing. Initial conditions are read from the output file of the trajectory optimisation program tosca-ts, and burn parameters such as ΔV are iterated through a specified range. This report outlines the theory, structure and use of the program dust, version 1.1.