Nebula Public Library

The scope of the project was to investigate and develop suitable strategies for the development of nano-enabled fibre reinforced plastics (neFRP) in order to produce materials tailored to the customer's needs and requirements. Within the scope of the work was also to establish a quality control system to assure that the produced products are of acceptable quality and can be integrated in functional parts for space applications.

Microparticles are one of the most unknown components of the space environment. Their observation and investigation is complicated by their small size and their high velocity. When impacting on a spacecraft surface, a plasma cloud is generated by shock wave and surface ionization processes. This transient cloud of vaporized and ionized particle and surface material, referred to as impact plasma, rapidly expands to the meter scale within microseconds, thereby interacting with spacecraft surface components.

Thousands of man-made objects are currently in orbit around the Earth. These range from active satellites to flecks of paint, via spent rocket stages and fragments of satellite debris. Due to the drag of the very thin high altitude atmosphere, these objects have slowly decaying orbits, and will eventually re-enter the Earth's thicker, lower atmosphere. Most will be destroyed on entry due to the aerothermal heating experienced at hypersonic velocities at altitudes between 40 and 80km. However, some objects reach the ground.

The awareness of the risk of uncontrolled accumulation of man-­‐made objects became significant in the late 70's and since then, a number of space debris mitigation guidelines have been published by various organizations. The general aim is to reduce the growth of space debris by ensuring that space systems are designed, operated, and disposed in a manner that prevents them from generating debris throughout their lifetime, assuring the sustainable space utilization.