Impact Risk Assessment for Lunar Missions

ESABASE2/Debris is ESA's tool to analyse the effects of the space debris and meteoroid environment on spacecraft in Earth orbit. It allows establishing 3D models and incorporates - amongst others - the latest models of the space debris and meteoroid environment. In view of some upcoming missions to the Moon, an extension of the analysis capabilities of ESABASE2's Debris application was performed to be able to assess the risk posed by meteoroid impacts during the entire mission. The main developments comprised the extension of the orbit propagation capabilities to lunar orbits including the consideration of several perturbations and the implementation of NASA's LunarMEM meteoroid model as well as the extension of the existing Grün meteoroid model to lunar orbits. The validation of the software was performed by means of a comparison of the impact flux and damage assessment results with NASA's Bumper software.