Abstract: The breakup of satellites in orbit is one of the primary sources of space debris. Accurate simulation of the dynamic evolution of the debris cloud can avoid the collision between the debris and other satellites in orbit. This paper proposes a method of modeling debris clouds based on the perturbation orbit reachable domain theory for the complex medium-term evolution of the debris cloud. In this method, the spatial distribution of the debris cloud is described by the reachable domain envelope, and the density of uniformly distributed debris is characterized by calculating the volume of the reachable domain. Then, to improve the characterization accuracy, the debris cloud was stratified according to the size of the velocity increment, and the sub-clouds with different velocity increments were simulated to achieve the accurate calculation of the non-uniformly distributed debris density. The simulation results show that compared with the numerical results, the medium-term debris cloud given by the proposed method is consistent in terms of spatial distribution and density order, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Key words: Satellite breakup, Debris cloud, Debris density, Orbital reachable domain