Orbital Debris Cloud Propagation Simulation in Orbit

Orbital debris proliferation is a growing concern as launch cadences continue to increase and collisions and breakup events become routine. An essential part of mitigating the risk of debris collisions and breakup events is understanding how in-orbit collisions fragment and propagate in orbit, particularly for active debris removal missions that include mechanical impacts. This paper uses computational hypersonic impact modeling to estimate in-orbit debris fragments and velocity distributions, which are then propagated through individual low-earth orbits to understand the details. The particle breakup is based on a 5mm object impacting an aluminum plate, modeled using smoothed particle hydrocode and finite element mesh solids. The orbital mechanics and relationships are defined to generate theoretical debris clouds from hypervelocity impacts (HVI) in LEO. In addition to providing the tools to estimate where these collisions may occur for any relative velocity, $||\bar{v}_r||$. Further, we provide a framework that rotates the HVI debris cloud motion to the Hill frame for the identified collision. Allowing for the rotated HVI data to be the initial conditions for a simulation using the relative equations of motion between two satellites. Thereby, simulating the debris cloud propagation using orbital mechanics and determining the change in orbit, and the resulting risk to satellites in the region human habitable region. This study specifically investigates the effect of debris cloud generation for ISS-like orbits from $400-500km$ and found in most cases $89\%$ of the resulting cloud de-orbit within 1000s. Integrating the numerical ANSYS tool and classical orbital mechanics, with the relative motion, provides a setup to model short-term orbit cloud propagation and de-orbit simulation.