NASA has a new database to predict meteoroid hazards for spaceflight

There are many issues that spacecraft designers have to contemplate. Getting smacked within the delicate components by a rock is only one of them, however it’s a essential one.

A micrometeoroid hitting the improper a part of the spacecraft might jeopardize a whole mission, and the years of labor it took to get to the purpose the place the mission was really in space within the first place.

However even when the engineers who design spacecraft find out about this danger, how is it greatest to keep away from them? A brand new programming library from analysis at NASA might assist.

Admittedly, engineers have already got a instrument for this function. NASA’s Meteoroid Engineering Mannequin (MEM) permits them to plug in a deliberate trajectory for his or her spacecraft and obtain an output that defines the place and from which route they’re prone to encounter micrometeoroids.

The James Webb Area Telescope is an ideal instance of why such a system is important. On its method to the L2 Lagrange level, it has already suffered a minimum of 20 micrometeoroid impacts, a minimum of one in every of which hit the space telescope’s main mirror, leaving a dent that also impacts the standard of its photographs to this day.

Resulting from such high-profile occurrences, spacecraft designers are already conscious of the dangers. Nevertheless, many do not know their trajectories when designing their programs. And not using a deliberate trajectory, the MEM is all however ineffective.

Enter Althea Moorhead from NASA’s Meteoroid Surroundings Workplace at Marshall Area Flight Middle and her colleagues Katie Milbrandt from Auburn and Aaron Kingery from ERC, Inc., additionally based mostly at Marshall.

They improved the MEM’s performance by introducing a library of identified spacecraft trajectories and the MEM outputs for every. The work is published within the journal Advances in Area Analysis.

As a substitute of realizing their finish trajectory, spacecraft designers would be capable of merely take a look at the library and decide whether or not there are any important dangers from meteoroids on any variety of potential trajectories.

Particularly, the library contains information on orbital paths round each important planet, some switch orbits, and a minimum of two “halo” orbits, the place the spacecraft would reap the benefits of the relative stability of a planet’s Lagrange points.

The output of the library permits for visualizations of the dangers the spacecraft would encounter, which is way simpler to grasp than advanced equations and possibilities for designers who do not essentially concentrate on micrometeoroid hazards.

That was the unique impetus for growing the library—to offer generalists who do not essentially have time to grok the small print of micrometeoroid places and dangers however nonetheless want to contemplate them as a part of their mission design.

The paper authors stress that the library should not be used for the formal danger evaluation that NASA requires of all missions destined for launch. That requirement can nonetheless be met by the MEM itself, together with a well-established orbit. However, if that orbit occurs to learn by the library described within the paper, all the higher for it.