Employment Opportunities

Internship: Flight Dynamics Engineer

Ref.: 1047

Experience: Students
Country: United Kingdom
City:  Harwell - Oxford

Description

The proposed project consists in developing an “Orblife” tool to compute the orbital life for non-operational satellites and space debris objects in order to be able to monitor their decay and estimate a re-entry epoch.
In order to achieve this goal, a semi-analytical propagator will be used, performing long-term propagations (up to 100 years) based on the Orekit library, which already implements the DSST propagator. The tool will be integrated in GMV’s focussuite infrastructure, which provides the graphical user interface and the input-options access methods.
The following activities have been identified:

  • Analyze historical solar-activity data and generate a long-term solar-activity evolution.
  • Analyze the atmosphere models implemented in the DSST model and adapt it to use the long-term solar-activity evolution.
  • Load a historical dataset of orbital information for space objects, e.g. TLEs.
  • Process for each object the historical orbital information fitting the DSST forces model including drag effects in order to characterize the object’s behavior and obtain a ballistic co-efficient based on the selected model.
  • Perform a long-term propagation up to re-entry altitude and estimate the re-entry epoch for each object.
  • Perform a sensitivity analysis on the re-entry epoch with respect to the ballistic coefficient.

Requirements

- Academic degree: MSc Aerospace Engineering
- Level of English: Advanced
- Technical knowledge:

  • Good mathematics and physics background.
  • Basic knowledge in Orbital dynamics
  • Basic knowledge of computational coding (any language, preferably object-oriented)

 

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