On-orbit collision activities and breakup model
- Paper number
IAC-08.A6.5.11
- Author
Mr. Li Yi-yong, Academy of Equipment Command and Technology, China
- Year
2008
- Abstract
Increasing space debris makes potential threat to spacecraft’s security, and becomes environment question noticed widely by many countries. There are many sorts of source of space debris. Although there are more explosion fragments than other populations in the current environment, collision fragments will take over as the most numerous populations in about 50 years according to Liou’s prediction. But the hypervelocity impact breakup physics is very complicated and modeling it is very difficult and hardly probable. A new statistic collision breakup model of NASA, including size distributions, area-to-mass distributions, and delta velocity distributions, is discussed in detail. In size distributions, this model divides collision into two types of catastrophic and non-catastrophic. It employs characteristic length, replacing previous mass, as the independent variable in developing functions for the number of debris created. Area-to-mass distributions are normal distribution functions with characteristic length, and delta velocity distributions are also a normal distribution function with area-to-mass ratios. Then, the breakup model’s calculation structure is analyzed carefully, and the calculation flow of breakup model is clarified. Lastly, a case of on-orbit catastrophic collision is researched based on the breakup model. It can be concluded that the new NASA collision breakup model is more coincident with actual debris distribution than previous breakup model, but it is still developing today.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)