Spacecraft and their payloads are required to meet a casualty risk threshold for uncontrolled re-entries. The requirements demand that consideration be paid to the whole spacecraft and payload in order to achieve an optimised mission that is not penalised, where possible, by the cost of performing a controlled entry. The demisability of the spacecraft bus has received significant attention in recent years, the demisability of payloads has received less focus.
This study aims to identify design solutions to improve the demisability of optical payloads, without impacting their performance. With the final goal of producing a set of guidelines and requirements to be used by optical payload designers and manufactures. The work performed was split into four tasks:
1. Review of the space debris mitigation requirements and identification of the critical issues affecting the demisability of optical payloads (i.e. critical materials and associated component size, etc.)
2. Identification of design for demise techniques for reference optical payloads
3. Assessment of design for demise techniques on reference optical payloads, including impact of spacecraft bus
4. Derivation of guidelines and requirements for design of demisable optical payloads, proposed technology road map and test plans
Preliminary investigations found that the demisability of a significant number of optical payload objects is poor within their anticipated mass and size limits. The material was found to have the most significant impact followed by mass.