ESA commissions Deimos with the DRACO satellite to scrutinise from its entrails how it immolates in orbit
The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected the Spanish company Deimos Space to take on the role of prime contractor for the innovative DRACO satellite, a pioneering and disruptive space project.
It is not a scientific space mission, nor is it dedicated to the environmental study of the Earth. The cleverly-named Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object (DRACO) is part of the Zero Debris initiative, announced in June 2023 by ESA director general Josef Aschbacher.
Aimed at stopping the creation of new space debris, ESA's Zero Debris aims to bring to the surface by 2030 new technologies to build space systems that will tear apart, disintegrate and burn up completely and in a controlled manner during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. ‘On the ground, it is not possible to recreate the speed and movements of an uncontrolled re-entry,’ laments ESA project manager Stijn Lemmens.
DRACO is essentially a far-reaching space experiment, which aims to place a satellite in orbit at an altitude of 500 kilometres and immediately set it on a path to self-destruct. Well, to collect a multitude of data and images from the very entrails of the spacecraft as it falls at high speed to Earth, burning and self-immolating in the upper layers of the atmosphere.
With the varied information obtained and transmitted to the ground, European scientists and engineers hope to better understand the complex and largely unknown physics that governs the re-entry and destruction process of satellites positioned in low Earth orbit, those that are less than 2,000 kilometres from our Blue Planet.
Ultra-rugged sensors and cameras
The formal ceremony for ESA's selection and contracting of Deimos for the launch of the first development phase of the mission was staged on Tuesday, 24 September. This took place after the completion of the feasibility phase of DRACO last June and was held at the company's Satellite Integration Centre in Puertollano, some 200 kilometres from Madrid.
On the ESA side, the 3 million euro contract was signed by the head of the Agency's Space Security programme, Holger Krag, for whom DRACO is a mission that aims to ‘validate our re-entry models and aims to better understand what happens when satellites burn up in the atmosphere’.
On the Deimos side, the contractual document was signed by its CEO, Simone Centuori, who underlines that DRACO is ‘a milestone that will provide unprecedented information on satellite re-entry processes’. He adds that its development is ‘a sign of the company's commitment to innovation and sustainability, which will pave the way for a safer orbital environment’.
The phase now being activated will conclude with the Critical Design Review (CDR) scheduled for November 2025, which is when the satellite will begin to take shape in Puertollano. If there are no incidents, DRACO will be launched into space in the first quarter of 2027 with a European Vega-C rocket as the first option.
What will DRACO be like? With a take-off weight of between 170 and 200 kilos, its size will be ‘somewhat smaller than a domestic washing machine’, says Paolo Minacapilli, coordinator of technical activities at Deimos. Once positioned by the rocket at about 500 kilometres and facing the Earth, the instruments will be activated, ‘which will be around 200 ultra-resistant sensors’ attached to different structures, equipment and components, ‘which will measure temperatures and deformations for as long as possible while the satellite around it burns’, summarises Stijn.
On board are also four infrared mini-cameras,’ continues Minacapilli, ’to observe what is happening, how the structure, panels and passive elements are disintegrating, which will start to disintegrate and burn at 120 kilometres, the altitude at which atmospheric re-entry begins. Almost everything will have burned up and volatilised by the time the 70-kilometre altitude is reached. But not all of it.
Less than 24 hours to live for 17 million euros
DRACO's technical manager at Deimos, Lorenzo Tarabini, explains that the data collected by the sensors and the observations captured by the cameras will be stored in a small capsule of about 40 centimetres designed to survive. It will be equipped with a protective heat shield similar to that used by NASA or SpaceX manned space capsules.
Equipped with a separation mechanism, the 16-kilogram capsule will separate from what remains of DRACO at a planned altitude of 60 kilometres, descend at five times the speed of sound (Mach 5) and gradually slow down. At about 40 kilometres, a parachute will open and 20 Megabytes of stored data will begin to be downloaded and picked up by the Inmarsat satellite network. This will take about 20 minutes.
The surviving capsule, once braked and stabilised by the parachute, will fall into the waters of the Indian Ocean and sink. It will have accomplished its mission if the important data are relayed by Inmarsat to one of ESA's receiving antennas around the world. In total, DRACO's unique mission will take between 5 and 12 hours from orbit.
To ensure the success of the ambitious DRACO project, Deimos is leading an international consortium comprising six European companies and organisations specialising in aerodynamics, aerothermodynamics, descent systems and object fragmentation: the Von Karman Institute in Belgium, Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen GmbH in Germany and the UK companies Fluid Gravity Engineering, Belstead Research, Dynamic Imaging Analytics and Vorticity.
The importance of the DRACO mission, with a total investment of 17 million euros, was underlined by the presence at the Puertollano event of the director of the Spanish Space Agency, Juan Carlos Cortés, the regional minister of Economy and Employment of the Autonomous Community of Castilla-La Mancha, Patricia Franco, and the mayor of the town, Miguel Ángel Ruiz, who highlighted the economic and technological dimension that DRACO brings to the city.
In addition to being the main contractor for the project, Deimos is also responsible for the design and management of the mission, the systems engineering, the development and integration of the platform and the construction of the ground segment as well as the user segments.