On the 11th of April, our Lorenzo Giudici successfully defended his PhD thesis “Space debris environment analysis with continuum mechanics”, at Politecnico di Milano to be awarded the doctoral degree in Aerospace Engineering.
His research, supervised by Camilla Colombo from Politecnico di Milano and Francesca Letizia from ESA, derived novel approaches for the characterisation of orbital breakups, the propagation of space debris clouds and the evaluation of the in-orbit collision risk, through the continuum mechanics formalism. Main outcomes of his work are a probabilistic debris evolutionary model and a metric to measure the environmental impact of missions in space.