International Space Station Bipropellant Plume Contamination Model Update for Short Thruster Pulse Widths

Published 2022-05-15 From Johnson Space Center 4 authors

Attribution

This is the abstract and citation. Full text lives at NASA NTRS — we link out rather than host. All credit to the authors and Johnson Space Center.

Abstract

Verbatim from NASA NTRS. Not paraphrased, not summarized.

The International Space Station (ISS) Bipropellant Plume Contamination Model has been a vital tool for characterizing the thruster plume-induced contamination environment at the ISS but was not intended to be used for very short thruster pulse widths. This paper presents an updated model that ensures full start-up and shut-down phases are modeled for each thruster firing, when the majority of liquid phase contaminant mass is released. The updated ISS Bipropellant Plume Contamination Model prevents potential under-prediction of thruster plume-induced contamination due to visiting vehicle proximity operations and provides a way to take advantage of thruster start-up and shut-down data performance data gathered during thruster test programs, if available.

Authors

Katie Fox Boeing (United States)
Courtney Steagall Jacobs (United States)
Taria Usher Boeing (United States)
Erica Worthy Johnson Space Center

Keywords

bipropellant
plume contamination
space environments
induced contamination
thruster performance
contamination model

Citation: Katie Fox, Courtney Steagall, Taria Usher , et al. (2022). International Space Station Bipropellant Plume Contamination Model Update for Short Thruster Pulse Widths. Johnson Space Center. NASA NTRS ID 20210025207. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20210025207 ↗