Our Master student Christian Fusaro presented the latest results of his thesis at the 11th IAASS Conference on Space Safety. His work was part of the ERC Project COMPASS and focused on interfacing the long-term propagation and the destructive re-entry analysis for re-entry prediction and demisability analysis. He specifically analysed the re-entry of satellites in Highly Elliptical Orbits (HEO). His work looked at the use of analytical theories such as the overshoot boundary to find suitable interfaces. This approach exploits the fast simulations of semi-analytical long-term propagations with the higher accuracy of destructive re-entry tools to predict the re-entry and the aerothermal loads on the spacecraft during the atmospheric passages.
In his work, Christian also studied the contribution of the break-off of solar on the re-entry prediction since the reduction in the cross-sectional area strongly influences the interaction of the spacecraft with the atmosphere. We used the INTEGRAL mission to test and validate our approach.
If you are interested in this research, you can reach out at ResearchGate here.