A Dedicated Simulation Chain for Hypervelocity Impacts Effect on Disc, Impact Sensor of the Comet Interceptor/Esa Mission

Comet Interceptor is an ESA mission, which will be launched in 2029 towards an as-yet-undiscovered dynamically new comet. The Dust Impact Sensor and Counter (DISC), developed by our team, will be mounted on board two of the three foreseen Comet Interceptor spacecrafts, aiming to determine the coma dust features of the target comet. DISC’s sensing plate will be exposed to the cometary dust environment and subjected to Hyper-Velocity Impacts (HVI), due to the high flyby speed (7 – 70 km/s). Laboratory facilities do not allow testing the whole range of impact cases that DISC will undergo during the measurements. To overcome this limitation, we implemented a simulation system with ANSYSTM software and AUTODYNTM hydrocode, able to reproduce a wide range of dust particle impacts. The simulation process involves a hybrid model, which is discretized with both Smooth Particles Hydrodynamic (SPH) and Finite Element methods (FE) and organized in two connected phases. The results we herein illustrate confirm that the simulation system we implemented allows simulating the DISC operative phase in an efficient, fast, and reliable way.