On July 20th, 2023, the Chinese Postdoctoral Science Foundation announced the projects it supports in the first half of 2023. Over 7,000 projects were proposed and submitted and 1,200 of which were selected. The project titled "Numerical Investigation and Intelligent Modeling for Spacecraft Rarefied-Gas Dynamics Based on Spherical Satellite Precise Orbit Determination" proposed by Dr. Wen Guangwei is chosen and granted with a fund of eighteen thousand Chinese Yuan.
The project proposed by Dr. Wen focuses on rarefied-gas dynamics of low-earth orbit (LEO) spacecrafts. Rarefied gas flow simulations were proposed to be employed to accurately predict the rarefied-gas dynamics of the spacecrafts with different aerodynamic configurations. The rarefied gas flow simulation was validated by precise orbit determination (POD) data of the Q-Sat satellite. The Q-Sat was launched by our lab on August 2020 and currently orbits around the earth with an orbit height of 450km. The physics-based neural network will be employed to predict the 3-axes rarefied-gas forces and moments of the spacecraft with a specific shape.
The project will also stimulate the investigations of the earth atmosphere density distributions and developments of a data-based atmosphere density model.
