ORBITAL DEBRIS IMPACT SURVIVABILITY MODELS FOR ROBOTIC SATELLITES

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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 tools-predictive orbital debris impact survivability models-for 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 panels-the 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.