Work is underway to create a spacecraft that won't be rocketed into outer space but will be purposely destroyed on the ground.

DebriSat is a 110-pound (50 kilograms) satellite that's a double for a modern low-Earth orbit spacecraft in terms of its components, materials used, and fabrication procedures. But once fabricated and tested, DebriSat is doomed.

The spacecraft will be the target of a future hypervelocity impact experiment to examine the physical characteristics of debris created when two satellites collide.

NASA and the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center are co-sponsors of DebriSat. The NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston is leading the effort. [Photos: Space Debris Images & Cleanup Concepts]

Impact risk assessments

Data gleaned from demolishing DebriSat will be valuable in the short- and long-term, said J. C. Liou of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office.

"Collision fragments are expected to dominate the future orbital debris environment," Liou told SPACE.com. Therefore, he said, a high fidelity breakup model describing the outcome of a satellite collision in terms of the fragment size, mass, area-to-mass ratio, shape, and composition distributions is needed for reliable short- and long-term impact risk assessments.

Those appraisals deal with debris as small as 1 millimeter for critical space assets and for good orbital debris environment definition, Liou said. Some of the distributions for "large" fragments can be obtained from the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) observations. But the SSN data are limited to 10-centimeter (4 inches) and larger objects. "Laboratory-based experiments are necessary to collect data for smaller debris," he said.

As a modern satellite target, obliterating DebriSat is expected to improve the NASA standard satellite breakup model.

Laboratory-based impact tests

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Boom! NASA to Demolish Spacecraft in the Name of Science