A library of meteoroid environments encountered by spacecraft in the inner solar system

• Published in: Advances in space research Vol. 72; no. 10; pp. 4582 - 4595
• Main Authors: Moorhead, Althea V., Milbrandt, Katie, Kingery, Aaron
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 15-11-2023
• Subjects: Meteoroids; Risk assessment; Space environments; Space environments; Meteoroids; Risk assessment
• ISSN: 0273-1177; 1879-1948
• DOI: 10.1016/j.asr.2023.08.016

NASA’s Meteoroid Engineering Model (MEM) is designed to provide aerospace engineers with an accurate description of potentially hazardous meteoroids. It accepts a spacecraft trajectory as input and its output files describe the flux, speed, directionality, and density of microgram- to gram-sized meteoroids relative to the provided trajectory. MEM provides this information at a fairly fine level of detail in order to support detailed risk calculations. However, engineers and scientists in the very early planning stages of a mission may not yet have developed a trajectory or acquired the tools to analyze environment data. Therefore, we have developed an online library11https://fireballs.ndc.nasa.gov/mem/library/. of sample MEM runs that allow new users or overloaded mission planners to get a quick feel for the characteristics of the meteoroid environment. This library provides both visualizations of these runs and input files that allow users to replicate them exactly. We also discuss the number of state vectors needed to obtain an accurate representation of the environment encountered along our sample trajectories, and outline a process for verifying that any given trajectory is adequately sampled.