Space debris re-entry breakup
Atmospheric re-entry of space debris is the movement of outer space object though the gases of an atmosphere. This is a step-by-step guide of space debris re-entry breakup.
A month after Columbus discovered America and 250 years before Jefferson was born, the first meteorite re-entry was recorded and named donnerstein or thunderstone.
Meteorite r-entry
Atmospheric re-entry on Earth occurs at an altitude of 100km. Re-entries of large space debris may touch ground, making it important to study the breakup process of a debris. There are two kinds of re-entry:
Controlled re-entry : Specific trajectory of re-entry at a known location., mostly for navigable spacecrafts.
Uncontrolled re-entry : Re-entry of debris is unknown, such as space debris or meteorites.
Uncontrolled debris accelerates through space towards Earth due to gravity. It then experience a mechanical stress called the atmospheric drag. This force added on to the shock wave formed, causes compression of air in front of the debris, which then becomes the source of aerodynamic heating. As a consequence, the debris loses mass or disintegrates into smaller objects. This phenomena is called ablation. When the debris is smaller, it has a lower compressive strength, making it possible to explode.
Space debris re-entry heating
When a debris enters the atmosphere from space, high level of heating occur due to the high velocity of the debris. The first type of heating comes from the convective heating when chemical recombinations reacts between the debris's surface and atmospheric gas caused by the flow of hot gas around the body.
One of the main module that will be taken into account in FAST is therefore the heat fluxes of any triangulated re-entry vehicle by solving the heat equation. This then allows to run a destruction analysis of the re-entry object along with the history of the state of the vehicle.
In the next blog, we will be describing the basics of flight mechanics that will be the complementary module in FAST to predict the trajectory of debris re-entry.
