Estimating the decay rates of orbital debris through upper-atmosphere density data supplemented with on-board accelerometer measurements

This thesis is focused on research of an accurate method to compute atmospheric density. It presents a comparison between data calculated by MSISE-90 model and ones obtained by the accelerometers on-board of GRACE. It describes a possible new satellite METRIC, which has, as goal, the improve of density data in upper atmoshpere to have better estimate of air drag and, consequently, of satellite operative life.