Orbital debris risk assessment for a satellite in cosmo-skymed orbit

This paper presents a M/OD risk assessment carried out for a spacecraft representative of the Italian Cosmo-Skymed satellites. At first, the calculation was performed through the ESABASE2-DEBRIS tool, which revealed to suffer several disadvantages on both (i) the reliability of the flux calculations and (ii) the possibility of implementing damage equations truly representing honeycomb sandwich panels structures. Concerning the first point, the most appropriate environmental models (i.e. ORDEM2000 and MASTER01) provided significantly different results mainly in prevision mode . Regarding the second point, damage equations available into ESABASE2 do not apply to any typical honeycomb sandwich panel structure, such as that of Cosmo-Skymed. Moreover, there is no possibility of implementing user-defined equations into the software. Considering the above mentioned limitations, it was decided to implement a completely independent RA procedure, which employs (i) M/OD fluxes calculated by recent environment models not included in ESABASE2 and (ii) special damage equations for honeycomb structures available in the open technical literature. On one hand, the M/OD fluxes predicted by the last available version of the ESA's MASTER model (2005) were obtained and compared with the outputs of ORDEM2000. In the M/OD size range of interest (³ 0.1 mm) the expected contributions from the catastrophic breakup of the Chinese satellite Fengyun 1C, occurred in January 2007, was estimated. Realistic directional fluxes on the satellites of the Cosmo-Skymed constellation were therefore inferred. In addition, the probability of collision with cataloged debris, typically larger than 5-10 cm, was estimated as well with the ISTI code SDIRAT. M/OD fluxes and damage equations were put together using the Matlab computational environment.