Abstract
Small debris, from 100 μm to 1 mm, can cause severe damages when impacting on a spacecraft surface. However for this size range there is a lack of data. Therefore it is important to develop systems able to estimate accurately the number of impacts at which a spacecraft is exposed during its lifetime. An active in-situ debris sensor has been developed for this purpose and will be mounted on a small satellite, which will operate in polar orbit for a mission of one year. The sensor's area is 81 cm2 for a weight of 23 g. Two types of information can be deduced: the number of impacts and the approximation of debris size. On this paper is reported the installation of the sensor on the small satellite as well as its working principle. Besides, minimum detectable size of debris and collision probability have been estimated. The latter has been calculated to be only 2.8% due to the smallness of the detector and to the shortness of the mission. Nevertheless its capability to detect broken lines and to transmit the data to OBC has been demonstrated. Thereby this active in-situ space dust measurement system is very promising for its lightness, low-cost, and ability to provide immediate data on the space debris population.
