Marco Fossati, Principal Investigator of MIDGARD and Fabio’s supervisor, adds: “Improved modelling and simulation of the aerothermodynamically-induced fragmentation is paramount to design systems for safe demise and to assess the associated ground impact risk.”Īn event in Bordeaux, France, at the end of this month will bring together experts in the ‘aerothermodynamics’ of reentry as well as ‘design for demise’ – the practice of designing space hardware to make it more likely to fully burn up in the atmosphere, rather than having any element survive down to the ground. The prediction of the reentry processes is impacted by the progressive fragmentation and thermal erosion of the re-entering objects as a result of the severe aerothermal loads.” Europe’s largest spacecraft leaves a longer-term legacy as the basis for the European Service Module of the NASA-ESA Orion spacecraft, designed to return astronauts to the Moon, and planned to fly on NASA’s first Artemis mission later this year.ĭestructive atmospheric reentry is a traditional way of disposing of spacecraft and satellites at the end of their working lives, but ESA and international regulations state that the risk of injury to people or property on the ground must be lower than one in 10 000.įábio Morgado of the University of Strathclyde, working on MIDGARD, states: “Addressing the risk of the atmospheric reentry of space debris is progressively becoming more and more pressing due to the increase in the number of orbiting objects and the consequent higher frequency of reentry.
This ongoing activity aims at reducing the uncertainty on the simulation of destructive atmospheric entry by combining highly accurate but expensive and low-fidelity and fast simulation methods.Ī total of five ATVs resupplied the International Space Station between 20, all of them disposed of by atmospheric reentry. This study of the ATV’s demise took place as part of the MIDGARD (MultI-Disciplinary modellinG of the Aerothemodynamically-induced fragmentation of Re-entering boDies) activity of ESA’s Open Space Innovation Platform with the University of Strathclyde’s Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering.
This forms part of the process of modelling the hypersonic motion of gases around the falling spacecraft through ‘Computational Fluid Dynamics’. This simulation of ESA’s Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) space truck reentering Earth’s atmosphere starts by representing the surrounding of the spacecraft as a three-dimensional cloud of interconnected points, a so-called ‘computational grid’.
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