Dark: Optimizing space debris remediation with Qarnot's HPC

Why Dark chose Qarnot

Dark chose Qarnot for its versatile and scalable computing infrastructure, ensuring it meets our diverse needs and supports our growth, along with the increasing volume of our simulations and analyses.

Qarnot’s turnkey environment and expertise make deploying our tools straightforward, allowing us to maximize the benefits of high-performance computing (HPC). With infrastructure concerns handled by Qarnot, we can focus on the crucial technological challenges ahead..

Why HPC is essential

Optimizing numerical models is just as crucial as breakthrough innovations. When evaluating our systems’ performance, we quickly realized that the accuracy of our simulations is as important as introducing new technologies. These optimizations are vital to overcoming barriers to future space missions.

High Performance Computing (HPC) removes the limitations associated with computational capacity, allowing for the use of more versatile and detailed models, thereby increasing their representativeness. Therefore, adopting this approach from the early stages of our development was essential for creating the models and optimizations needed to define a new category of orbital services.

The opportunities provided by HPC

To exceed current standards, future generations of space systems will need to better address the various constraints of targeted missions and the space environment. Beyond performance improvements, the use of increasingly sophisticated models also enhances system predictability and reliability. This growing precision enabled by HPC is essential for demonstrating new capabilities and ensuring their robustness.

Additionally, the widespread adoption of HPC and the centralization of various simulation and analysis tools on a single platform offer the opportunity to establish a fully integrated development and validation process. Combined with advances in modeling and the efficiency of simulation tools, this approach significantly accelerates the technology design process and improves overall performance.

Applications of HPC at Dark

The first application for Dark focused on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to assist in developing separation models between the vehicle and aircraft during the ascent phase and atmospheric reentry. The increased computing power enabled the modeling of complex geometries of the simulation components and the inclusion of critical physical phenomena such as turbulence. Additionally, the ability to run numerous simulations expanded the scope of our studies, covering a wide range of initial drop conditions, pressure and temperature, and variations in atmospheric winds.

These studies allowed us to regulate the initial ignition conditions of our launch vector by adjusting the speed and inclination of the carrier at the time of release and to identify precise recovery zones for the stages. Thus, the HPC approach significantly supported the demonstration of key capabilities for Dark and proved its relevance in leveraging complex physical phenomena.

In light of these promising results, we are expanding the application of HPC in our developments, targeting analyses with significant potential for system sizing:

• Characterizing the thermal behavior of our systems’ components during orbital missions to optimize the sizing of the thermal protection layer and the thermal management system.
  
• Conducting Monte Carlo trajectory dispersion analyses to accurately identify the necessary over-dimensioning to address potential disturbances and degraded scenarios.