Abstract:
Satellite collision debris poses risks to existing space assets and future space missions. Predictive models of debris generated from these hypervelocity collisions are critical for developing accurate space situational awareness tools and effective mitigation strategies. Hypervelocity collisions involve complex phenomena that span several time- and length-scales. We have developed a satellite collision debris modeling approach consisting of a Lagrangian hydrocode enriched with smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), advanced material failure models, detailed satellite mesh models, and massively parallel computers. These computational studies enable us to investigate the influence of satellite center-of-mass (CM) overlap and orientation, relative velocity, and material composition on the size, velocity, and material type distributions of collision debris. We have applied our debris modeling capability to the recent Iridium 33-Cosmos 2251 collision event. While the relative velocity was well understood in this event, the degree of satellite CM overlap and orientation was ill-defined. In our simulations, we varied the collision CM overlap and orientation of the collision to span the range of possible outcomes to produce debris distributions that were compared to observed values. The models were also used to investigate the effects of material strength (or lack thereof) on debris generation as well as potential strategies for minimizing debris.
