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IMCCE Meteor Showers - Threat for Spacecrafts

• Presentation

If meteor showers are not a hazard for humans on Earth, they can be for any spacecraft out of the atmosphere. Meteoroids responsible for meteor showers are indeed arriving at "astronomical" relative velocities. They usually desintegrate in the atmosphere, whih is thus a very efficient shield. But any artificial satellites, the International space station or the shuttle is of course not protected by the atmosphere. At such hight relative velocities (10-70 km/s), any shock with even a 1 mm size meteoroid can be catastrophic. The reason is not only because of the mechanical shock itself, but also becasue there is a plasma created in case of an impact. This plasma can cause some electrical short-cuts, and make any fragile electronic device to die. The consequence is that the satellite operator is no more able to communicate with the machine. It then becomes out of control and is definitely lost.

• Past lost satellites

The most famous case is Olympus (ESA) in 1993. It is thought that an impact with a meteoroid belonging to the Perseid stream hit the satellite. During the 1998 Leonid meteor storm, the cosmonauts in the MIR space station wear their space suit and were ready for an emergency come back to Earth, in case the ship was hit by a big meteoroid. We know that some artificial satellites were hit during the 2002 Leonid storm, but no additional informations were communicated. During the 2003 Leonid shower, the astronomical satellite Chandra was hit with no more consequences than a change of the attitude. Finally the Hubble space telescope is also regularly hit by meteoroids, and impacts were found at each visit of the shuttle.

• How to protect an artificial satellite against meteoroid?

A certain number of recommandations (.doc file kindly provided by R. Jehn, ESA) were done by ESA to minimise the risk of collision. A simple example is to rotate the satellite so that the apparent surface presented to the meteoroid stream is minimized. The best and complete sollution would be to turn the satellite off, and on again after the storm. But such an operation costs a lot, and recquires about 6 days of work. So you really want to be sure it is worth it. That is why we (at IMCCE) are working at the prediction of meteor showers.

See also The European Space Debris Safety and Mitigation Standard by Alby et al. 2004

• What if the spacecraft is orbiting/surfacing another planet?