Space is congested, with the main component being space debris: 4 out of 5 tracked space objects is indeed non operational. Active debris removal (ADR) refers to the act of interacting with passive spacecraft or rocket bodies in order to reduce their remaining orbital lifetime. To stabilise the growth of space debris it is paramount to employ ADR, which is however very expensive, as it requires an entire mission to remove a single piece of debris. This is why multi-debris removal missions are becoming more and more popular, in that they optimise the cost of removal by performing multiple rendez-cous with different debris within a single mission. This project builds on past research where a preliminary mission design tool (PMDT) was created to remove a sequence of three predetermined objects from orbit, either optimising fuel consumption or time of flight. A previous Part IV project then looked into two optimisation techniques to optimise the sequence of such objects removal. This project will broaden the optimisation techniques analysis, and the debris pool to find potential missions which could drastically reduce the in-orbit debris mass.
Undergraduate
None
No lab has been assigned to this project