Abstract
A procedure for calculating the attitude disturbances imparted to a spacecraft by the impacts of meteoroids is presented herein. It is shown that the anisotropy of the incident flux of meteoroids on the space vehicle, coupled with the inherent asymmetry of typical vehicles, leads to a steady-state disturbance in addition to the possibility of disturbance torques due to single impacts of relatively rare, large particles. It is further shown that a multiplication of momentum effect takes place during the hypervelocity impact of a meteoroid; this phenomenon can increase the attitude perturbation effect of meteoroids by an order of magnitude. Finally, it is illustrated that, in spite of uncertainties of several orders of magnitude in the results, it is possible to accommodate the most pessimistic situation without excessive weight penalties and without undue complexity in the design of an attitude control system.
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