ORBITAL DEBRIS IMPACT SURVIVABILITY MODELS FOR ROBOTIC SATELLITES

轨道碎片以高超音速（7公里/秒或更高）飞行，对卫星构成重大威胁。根据轨道和表面积的不同，一些航天器在其使用寿命期间可能会经历数十次110毫米轨道碎片的超高速撞击，导致飞行和任务关键系统的故障和损坏，并最终给航天器所有者带来数十亿美元的经济损失。由于开发无人（机器人）卫星一直是加拿大空间计划的主要组成部分，因此确保这些资产免受此类情况的保护非常重要。拟议的研究计划的长期目标是开发有效的分析工具，预测轨道碎片撞击的生存能力模型，用于典型和未来的卫星结构布置，设计人员可以使用它来评估卫星任务中碎片撞击的后果。

Traveling at hypersonic speeds (7 km/s and higher), orbital debris represents a major threat to satellites. Depending on the orbit and surface area, some spacecraft may experience tens of hypervelocity impacts of 1 10 mm orbital debris over their lifetime, resulting in failure and damage of flight- and mission-critical systems and, ultimately, leading to multibillion-dollar financial losses for spacecraft owners. As developing unmanned (robotic) satellites has always been the major component of Canada's space program, it is highly important to ensure the protection of these assets from such scenarios. The proposed research program's long-term objective is to develop efficient analysis toolspredictive orbital debris impact survivability modelsfor typical and prospective satellite structural arrangements, which designers can use to evaluate the consequences of debris impacts for satellite missions. Using a combination of physical hypervelocity impact experiments and high-fidelity numerical simulations, this research program, in the short-term perspective, will focus on investigating the ballistic performance of sandwich panelsthe most commonly used external elements of satellite structures. Besides structural functions, sandwich panels provide orbital debris protection for the internal impact-sensitive components of satellites (circuit boards, cables, pressurized propellant tanks, etc.). However, ballistic limit models currently employed by the industry to determine the perforation/no perforation thresholds of these important protective elements often fail to provide accurate predictions and suffer from multiple major limitations, including limited numbers of impact conditions and panel design parameters considered in their development. This study will advance the state-of-the-art by developing accurate ballistic limit models in the form of semi-empirical performance equations and artificial neural networks for a widely extended spectrum of sandwich panels' design parameters and impact conditions, enabling a high-precision survivability analysis of different satellite configurations involving such panels. The proposed developments are essential for designing next-generation lightweight robotic satellites, enabling multibillion-dollar cost avoidance through preventing mission failures, reducing satellite launching costs by avoiding over-conservative shielding designs, and allowing Canada to emerge as a leader in robotic satellite manufacturing.