Orbital debris is a constraint on the long-term health of any spacecraft and must be consi-dered during mission planning. Varying mechanisms have been proposed to quantify the problem. Accurate in-situ data is essential with various types of sensors designed to detect orbital debris impacts employed on space missions since the 1950's [1]. The earliest of these was the PZT (piezoelectric lead zirconate tita-nate) sensor which was often used in-situ to measure the momentum of a particle at the time of impact. More recently, PVDF (Polyvinylidene fluoride) [2] has been employed as it exhibits piezoelectric capabilities along with the advantages of ruggedness, no bias re-quirement, ease of large area sensor construction, high counting rate capability, and space reliability, making it an ideal space debris sensor. Its large sensing sur-face area and ease of integration into a PZT sensor system makes it a desirable element in any in-situ space debris sensor.
@article{arxiv.1010.4077,
title = {Low-Velocity Impacts on PVDF Targets Using a Light Gas Gun},
author = {J. A. Carmona and M. Cook and J. Schmoke and R. Laufer and L. S. Matthews and T. Hyde},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1010.4077},
year = {2010}
}