NASA: Satellite industry practices for battery passivation to prevent orbital debris are confused and insufficient

by Peter B. de Selding

LA PLATA, Maryland — A NASA workshop with industry on preventing satellite batteries from exploding and creating orbital debris concluded that commercial industry, whose satellite buses NASA now regularly uses, uses techniques that fell short of NASA recommendations.

Part of the problem is “substantial confusion about what qualifies as acceptable practice, what level of testing is required, and how these self-evaluations should be documented for compliance with NASA’s Orbital Debris Assessment Reports (ODAR),” NASA concluded.

The agency summarized what it called “one of the . . .

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