ESA is teaming up with Europe’s satellite makers and equipment suppliers to evaluate candidate technologies to prevent the generation of space debris in key orbits by future space missions.
“This marks the first time that Europe’s three large satellite prime contractors – Airbus Defence & Space, Thales Alenia Space and OHB – have worked together in this way on a single contract,” explains Tiago Soares of ESA’s CleanSat programme.
“They will be gathering at ESA’s ESTEC technical centre along with subsystem suppliers and ESA experts to design the most promising technology building blocks to ensure Europe’s future low-orbit satellite designs are fully compliant with space debris regulations.”
These three companies are like Europe’s Formula 1 teams for space: designing uniquely challenging machines, relying on networks of smaller high-tech suppliers – and normally fiercely competitive. But space debris is a big enough problem to bring them together.
Some region of space are more useful – and therefore more valuable – than others. Geostationary orbit, providing stable points relative to Earth’s surface for telecommunications and meteorology, has been safeguarded for many years through international anti-debris regulations.
These ensure that geostationary ‘slots’ are vacated when a satellite reaches its end of life, preventing derelict satellites from interfering with live missions or becoming a source of space debris.
Now regulations have been extended to the heavily trafficked low-orbit region, less than 2000 km above our planet’s surface.
Among the key requirements: that all future missions can fully ‘passivate’ themselves to remove any chance of an orbital explosion; that they remove themselves from this orbital region within 25 years of their end of life; and that any atmospheric reentry has a less than one in 10 000 chance of harming anyone on the ground.
“Meeting these requirements carries heavy implications for satellite platform designs,” adds Tiago. “So with CleanSat the aim is to do it on a coordinated industry-wide basis, to identify key building blocks that can be developed jointly, to foster common supply chains and reduce costs and boost general European competitiveness.
“We began by asking the three prime contractors to tell us their priority areas, then put out a general announcement of opportunity for the suppliers to propose technologies based on them.
“From these proposals we have come to a shortlist of 28 concepts that will now be studied over the course of 2016 in our Concurrent Design Facility, using networked software tools to work together in real time.