Risks of Secondary Space Debris Generation from Net Capturing in Active Space Debris Removal Missions

Mitigation strategies which eliminate existing space debris, such as with Active Space Debris Removal (ASDR) missions, are now more important than ever regarding the ever-growing space debris population problem. One of the considered ASDR approaches uses a net as a capturing strategy. The benefits of such strategy are to allow for a large...

Adaptive Control for Spacecraft Rendezvous: A reinforcement meta-learning approach

The continued increase in the number of satellites in low Earth orbit has led to a growing threat of collisions between space objects. On-orbit servicing and active debris removal missions can alleviate this threat by extending the lifetime of active satellites and deorbiting inactive ones, but this requires advanced guidance and control...

Spacecraft Uncooperative Rendezvous & Docking Control

The Model Predictive Control (MPC) method provides a control strategy providing inherent robustness and improved capabilities in handling constraints while guaranteeing the satisfac- tion of the control objective. In recent years, Model Predictive Control (MPC) has started to see more application for the purpose of Rendezvous and Docking (RVD)...

Angles-only relative navigation in low earth orbit

Rendezvous in orbit has recently regained considerable attention, as it is required to enable on-orbit servicing or active debris removal activities. The pressing need for the realization of suchmissions falls within the more general societal attempt to make human activities more sustainable, avoiding wasting valuable resources and ensuring that...

Neuro-Adaptive Cooperative Tracking Rendezvous of Nonholonomic Mobile Robots

This brief proposes a neuro-adaptive method for the unsolved problem of cooperative tracking rendezvous of nonholonomic mobile robots (NMRs) subject to uncertain and unmodelled dynamics. A hierarchical cooperative control framework is proposed, which consists of a novel distributed estimator along with local neuro-adaptive tracking...

Flights are ten a sail - Re-use and commonality in the design and system engineering of small spacecraft solar sail missions with modular hardware for responsive and adaptive exploration

The exploration of small solar system bodies started with fast fly-bys of opportunity on the sidelines of missions to the planets. The tiny new worlds seen turned out to be so intriguing and different from all else (and each other) that dedicated sample-return and in-situ analysis missions were developed and launched. Through these, highly...

Design of Convex Guidance for the Final Phase of Satellite Rendezvous: Tested using Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulations

Over the past decades the steep increase in the number of space-debris objects have sparked many studies into active space-debris removal. Past collisions have shown that space debris is a very real threat to operational satellites and active debris removal is necessary to stabilize the situation. ESA has, therefore, performed multiple studies...

Analysis of the Rendezvous Phase of e.deorbit: Guidance, Communication and Illumination

The aim of this thesis is to investigate a debris-remediation technique where a chaser performs a rendezvous with the debris, establishes a rigid-link connection, and actively de-orbits the debris. Remediation of the space environment becomes an increasing urgency, since the continuously growing space debris population in low-Earth orbit...

Application of the Spherical Shaping Method to a Low-Thrust Multiple Asteroid Rendezvous Mission: Implementation, limitations and solutions

Since the development of the exponential sinusoid for low-thrust trajectory design by Petropoulos and Longuski [2004], more shape-based methods have emerged that ease up the work of a mission analyst. These methods are the ideal tool to generate a quick and almost complete overview of a large search space and are useful for producing first...

Rendezvous on an interval and a search game on a star

Rendezvous problems and search games (with two players) are related problems. In a rendezvous problem the players like to meet as soon as possible, while in a search game one of them tries to avoid the meeting as long as possible. So in a rendezvous problem the players have a common interest and in a search game the players have conflicting...

Control loops with human operators in space operations: part IV: research requirements for human-in-the-loop space teleoperator development

This report presents a discussion of short-term human engineering research requirements for developing rendezvous and docking and space telemanipulation capabilities. A catalogue of research topics related to human-in-the-loop teleoperation performance is given. This is followed by an overview of available resources for model analytical...

Control loops with human operators in space operations: part V: executive summary

This volume comprises the executive summary of the final report of the study on Control Loops with Human Operators in Space Operations, performed for the European Space Agency (ESA). It summarises the following four volumes: Part I : Human Engineering Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation Techniques (NLR) Part II : Robotics Operations and Manual...

Control loops with human operators in space operations: part III: rendezvous and docking operations and model analysis of performance with human-in-the-loop

This report presents the results of an illustrative analysis of human-in-the-loop rendezvous and docking (RVD) performance, for the purpose of demonstrating the practicality of applying human engineering methods and techniques, introduced in Part I of this project, to the analysis of control loops with human operators in space operations....