DESIGN FOR CONTAINMENT TECHNIQUES TO REDUCE SPACECRAFT RE-ENTRY FOOTPRINT

Kurzfassung

Clean Space is an ESA initiative to address the technological challenges in reaching sustainability of space activities on Earth and in orbit. Its purpose is to guarantee the safety of the human population and future space activities. Under this initiative, different solutions, such as Design for Demise (D4D) and debris removal, are studied. Design for Containment (D4C) is the design of spacecraft systems using methods that keep harmful objects under control or within limits, so as to reduce the number of impacting fragments on ground during re-entry events. While potentially increasing the impact mass, the lower number of fragments may significantly reduce the overall casualty risk. These methods could render future un-controlled re-entry missions compliant to the space debris mitigation guidelines without major design changes, that could put them at cost or schedule risk. In this paper, the system level investigations, simulation results and first findings of the on-going ESA funded study "Containment Techniques to Reduce Spacecraft Re-Entry Footprint” (also called the D4C study) are presented. The study aims to identify and validate promising containment techniques and to provide an update to the current material database for re-entry models (ESTIMATE). Feedback to the ESA guidelines for demise verification (DIVE) will also be a valuable outcome