Partial Optimization of Spacecraft Sandwich Shielding from Hypervelocity Impacts

With the increasing commercial space industry and orbital launches, the number of orbiting objects around Earth have steadily increased. Tracked orbital debris can be avoided by satellites with changes in their orbits, but there are about 130,000,000 objects less than 1 cm in diameter. Although small, the uncatalogued space debris travel at hypervelocity speeds, carrying enough energy to damage spacecraft. Damage can include structural or even electrical, caused by solid phase change into plasma during hypervelocity impact event. Currently, a Whipple or stuffed Whipple shield is used as passive micrometeoroid orbital debris shielding, which make use of shock fragmentation to decrease damage. Sandwich panel shielding have been investigated previously and found to increase performance. In this paper, the size of sandwich panel core patterns was varied to investigate the influence of the core structure on shielding performance. Using the performance metrics of residual energy, witness plate impact, and debris cloud temperature, it is suggested to consider an optimal core pattern diameter of nearly equal to the projectile’s diameter. This assessed value could provide helpful information for space mission design teams developing systems for meteorite concentrated regions of our Solar System such as the asteroid belt, Kuiper belt, rings of our gas giants, low Earth orbit, or Lagrange points L4 and L5 of two orbiting bodies.