A satellite damage sensor for detecting and quantifying damage from multiple hypervelocity impacts

Abstract

The ever-increasing number of earth-orbiting spacecraft and disused space junk is resulting in a dramatic rise in the risk of space debris impacting and damaging satellites and thereby negatively impacting the transmission of the internet, TV, radio, GPS and most telecommunications on Earth. While sense and avoid technologies are used for debris larger than 10mm, debris smaller than 10mm can remain undetected. Moreover, due to weight considerations, satellite shields are not always equipped to withstand hyper velocity impact of objects between 1mm – 10mm. While traditional material testing achieves a pass or no pass criteria, there is a significant requirement to detect impacts and quantify the level of damage following an impact. This is important to determine whether the satellite needs to be repaired or replaced. The paper proposes a smart surface technology for satellite shields that detects impact, locates damaged regions and quantifies damage by space debris. This surface consists of a network of resistive tracks that are arranged in multiple layers. When the smart surface is hit by space debris, the damage caused by the impact breaks the resistive traces at the point of impact. The broken traces are identified and used to determine the damaged areas. The results show that the mesh supports the detection of damage from multiple impacts. They also show that for the accurate determination of their size and shape of the damage, the resolution of the mesh needs to be improved to the sub-millimetre level.