Development of ORCA: On-ground Risk Casualty Assessment

According to European and American regulations, whenever a company is capable of bringing something into space, it has to provide data about the collective risk bounded to the operations. The total risk shall cover the entire mission, from launch to disposal, and the accepted value of risk is usually stated in a set of regulations and requirements according to multiple criteria (casualty risk, risk to critical assets, toxic risk). With this aim, the objective of the present thesis work is to develop and introduce a dedicated tool, called ORCA (On-ground Risk Casualty Assessment), capable of propagating the trajectory and evaluating the casualty risk at launch and at reentry, with a low computational cost. A 3 DOF model is developed for the reentry and launch phase in order to compute the collective risk on ground. The tool enables the choice between two modules, one for the risk during launch and one for a generic reentry condition. The user can set the quantities in the input file and the tool is completely autonomous. With a low computational cost, it is able to provide the impact points of the reentring fragments, given as input, considering also the uncertainites related to their ballistic and aerodynamics properties. The results showed in this work have the scope of validation, they have been compared with the ones generated by other similar tools on the shelf. In these simulations the nominal and the scattered initial conditions, for both the modules have been considered. The final aim of this tool is to develop a flexible and indipendent inner tool to be used in safety submissions.