The Master 2005 Model

The Meteoroid and Space Debris Terrestrial Environment Reference Model of the European Space Agency, ESA-MASTER, is currently being developed to its next release, MASTER. The contract for the upgrade was awarded to the Institute of Aerospace Systems at the Technische Universitaet Braunschweig together with QinetiQ. This paper will focus on the changes to the flux browser, and it will explain the validation process for the new MASTER population. MASTER will be delivered with a single flux browser, the MASTER application. This new software will cover all the functionalities that had previously been covered by the two flux browsers delivered with previous versions of the software. By following a statistical approach for all populations, the storage volume for the databases could be kept at a reasonable size while increasing fidelity. Within seconds, the new MASTER application can deliver precise fluxes, making an engineering model undesirable and obsolete. The validation of the MASTER reference population will be based on both impact data and observations. For the validation of the small-sized debris population, impact data from the Eureca and LDEF satellites as well as from the Hubble Space Telescope solar panels retrieved during service missions 1 and 3B are used. Some of the results of the LDEF chemistry of micrometeoroids experiment had been the motivation for significant changes especially in small particle modelling within MASTER. To validate the larger particles, radar and optical observations data are used. Here, data sources include the TIRA, Haystack, and Goldstone radars as well as the ESA Space Debris Telescope.