Planning and deploying large satellite constellations in low Earth orbit has become one of the most attention-catching trends of the new space economy. And while they open up exciting new possibilities for space-based services, in fields like communications and Earth observation, they also come with significant challenges. One of them is the need to replenish the constellation when satellites reach their end of life, deorbiting the old ones to ensure safe operations. But what happens when a satellite suffers a failure that prevents it from manoeuvring out of the way?
Constellation-servicing active debris removal (ADR) is a potential solution to deal with failed constellation satellites. Among the many challenges to establish such a service, is the planning of the sequence of satellites to be visited for removal, depending on the characteristics of the constellation, of the servicing spacecraft, and the number of failed satellites. A recent work published in Advances in Space Research by Adrián Barea and Hodei Urrutxua from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Juan Luis Gonzalo and Camilla Colombo from Politecnico di Milano proposes a framework for preliminary ADR mission analysis, based on constraint programming techniques. This framework is able to quantify the performance of a set of predefined mission choices with respect to the mission requirements. Moreover, if a poor performance is shown or if the mission choices have not been previously obtained, appropriate mission choices are generated so that the desired performance is optimised. The performance of this new framework is assessed for several scenarios of planned ADR services.
The paper is available in Open Access. You can check it out at:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2024.07.015