The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office (ODPO) develops, maintains, and updates orbital debris environmental models, such as the NASA Orbital Debris Engineering Model (ORDEM), to support satellite designers and operators by estimating the risk from orbital debris impacts on their vehicles in orbit. Updates to ORDEM utilize the most recent validated datasets from radar, optical, and in situ sources to provide estimates of the debris flux as a function of size, material density, impact speed, and direction along a mission orbit. On-going efforts within the NASA ODPO to update the next version of ORDEM include a new parameter that highly affects the damage risk – shape. Shape can be binned by material density and size to better understand the damage assessments on spacecraft. The in situ and laboratory research activities at the NASA ODPO are focused on cataloging and characterizing fragments from a laboratory hypervelocity-impact test using a high-fidelity, mock-up satellite, DebriSat, in controlled and instrumented laboratory conditions. DebriSat is representative of present-day, low Earth orbit satellites, having been constructed with modern spacecraft materials and techniques. The DebriSat fragment ensemble provides a variety of shapes, bulk densities, and dimensions. Fragments down to 2 mm in size are being characterized by their physical and derived properties. A subset of fragments is being analyzed further in NASA’s Optical Measurement Center (OMC) using broadband, bidirectional reflectance measurements to provide insight into the optical-based NASA Size Estimation Model. Additionally, pre-impact spectral measurements on a subset of DebriSat materials were acquired for baseline material characterization. This paper provides an overview of DebriSat, the status of the project, and ongoing fragment characterization efforts within the OMC.


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    Title :

    Optical Characterization of DebriSat Fragments in Support of Orbital Debris Environmental Models


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    22nd Annual Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies (AMOS) Conference ; 2021 ; Maui, HI, US



    Publication date :

    2021-10-27




    Type of media :

    Miscellaneous


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English





    Optical Characterization of DebriSat Fragments in Support of Orbital Debris Environmental Models

    Cowardin, Heather M. / Hostetler, John M. / Murray, James I. et al. | Springer Verlag | 2021

    Free access

    Optical Characterization of DebriSat Fragments in Support of Orbital Debris Environmental Models

    Heather M Cowardin / John M Hostetler / James I Murray et al. | NTRS


    NASA Orbital Debris Program Office and the DebriSat Project

    Liou, J.-C. / Cowardin, H. | NTRS | 2018