Meteorite hazard model for a space mission to Mars

Abstract

Abstract Currently, for the world’s space agencies, the robotic exploration of Mars is one of the most important tasks. One of the necessary stages for the implementation of this mission is the development and addition of new information to the State standard “Meteoric substance, spatial distribution model”. Until now, the State Standard has been more detailed in comparison with the American analogue (developed by NASA) and the European one. The standard is a mandatory document in the design of spacecraft. It should be noted that modeling of meteor hazard at a distance from Earth to Mars is a complex problem, since the analysis of the meteor population in near-Earth space does not give a complete picture of the propagation of meteoroids along the Earth-Mars route. Moreover, the further the trajectory of the spacecraft from the Earth’s orbit is, the less the number of near-Earth meteorites becomes. That is, objects that have the same orbital parameters with small bodies crossing the Earth’s orbit. The only way to solve this problem is to build an interpolation regression model, which is based on measurements from the Earth’s surface and observations of space missions. For this purpose, the density of sporadic meteoroids was transformed from the space mission coordinate system to the ground one. This was done in order to analyze meteorite observations by the Mariner 4 and Pioneer 10 spacecrafts. The results of the work made it possible to obtain new data for the spatial distribution of meteoroids on the Earth-Mars path. According to a comparison of our data with the data on the density of space debris in the previous works the most safe for space flights are normalization conditions of distributions of the elements of the orbits of meteoric bodies P(Z, e, i) < 60.