Active small-scale space debris removal by a space-based laser

Active small-scale space debris removal by a space-based laser

Pieters, Liam (TU Delft Aerospace Engineering)

Noomen, R. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Aerospace Engineering

2020-11-06

Space debris objects with sizes between 1 and 10 cm form the greatest risks for creating new collisions with active spacecraft as they are too small to track and too large to be shielded against. This research has simulated the performance of a space-based laser system on the removal of these small-scale debris objects. The selected system is placed in a Sun-synchronous orbit and consists of a high power 20 kW laser that shoots 600 J energy pulses with a repetition frequency of 33.33 Hz. The system detects and tracks the objects in-situ using a 1.5 m telescope from 800 km distance. From a distance of about 500 km, the laser fluence on the targets is sufficiently high to trigger ablation on the material surface. This decelerates the debris object and lowers its lifetime. The laser is tested on a randomly generated debris population of 5 000 objects. The results show that after 10 days of simulation, the lifetime of 334 objects are effectively lowered below 25 years and 614 objects are lowered below one month. At longer simulation time the efficiency decreases since less and less objects are left to target. Extrapolating the results, the laser could on an annual basis lower the lifetime of more than 36 000 objects below 1 month and 18 000 objects below 25 years, which is very promising. The results show that a space-based laser system is highly efficient as an Active Debris Removal (ADR) technique for debris objects between 1 and 10 cm.

Space
Debris
Removal

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:70c6dc7a-891a-407a-a7ca-be205f5d71b2

2022-11-01

Student theses

master thesis

© 2020 Liam Pieters