Abstract: To improve the survivability of orbiting spacecraft against space debris impacts, we propose an impact damage assessment method. First, a multi-area damage mining model, which can describe damages in different spatial layers, is built based on an infrared thermal image sequence. Subsequently, to identify different impact damage types from infrared image data effectively, the variational Bayesian inference is used to solve for the parameters in the model. Then, an image-processing framework is proposed to eliminate variational Bayesian errors and compare locations of different damage types. It includes an image segmentation algorithm with an energy function and an image fusion method with sparse representation. In the experiment, the proposed method is used to evaluate the complex damages caused by the impact of the secondary debris cloud on the rear wall of the typical Whipple shield configuration. Experimental results show that it can effectively identify and evaluate the complex damage caused by hypervelocity impact, including surface and internal defects.

Key words: Hypervelocity impact; Variational Bayesian; Sparse representation; Damage assessment

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