Determination of damage area of spacecraft shields impacted by space debris at hypervelocity using an SPH mesh.

Abstract

Space debris, are objects in Earth orbit consisting of small fragments from spent rocket stages and non-functional satellites. Accumulated in the lower earth orbit, these often cause considerable damage to the spacecraft orbiting around the earth. Hence it’s necessary to develop ways to protect the newly placed spacecraft from the debris. The goal of the project was to determine the damage area of the pressure wall using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) meshing, a dynamic finite element modeling (FEM) method.