ISS Experiments To Find Solutions For Cleaning Up Orbital Debris And Repairing Damaged Satellites

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In 2002, the European Space Agency launched Envisat, the largest civilian satellite (at the time) to go to low Earth orbit (LEO). For a decade, it observed our planet and sent back valuable data on Earth's climate, tracking the decline of Arctic sea ice and more, until it went dark in 2012. One of the prevailing theories for its demise is that it simply ran out of fuel. As LEO becomes more crowded, Envisat is a school bus-sized example of a growing area of concern in the space domain: orbital debris and the ever-increasing risk of disrupting active satellite missions that would yield outcomes ranging from inconvenient to catastrophic for modern society.

But how do you catch up to an uncooperative object tumbling through space faster than a speeding bullet? An international research collaboration between MIT and the German Space Agency (DLR) completed a series of experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS) that illuminated a possible path forward to help address this question.

"If we could refuel or repair these tumbling bodies that are otherwise functional, it would be really useful for orbital debris reduction, as long as we can catch up to it. But a close-proximity rendezvous is hard to do if you don't know exactly how your target is moving," says Keenan Albee SM '19, a Ph.D. candidate in aeronautics and astronautics who helped lead the project. "We've assembled a set of algorithms that figures out how the target is tumbling, and then along with other tools that allow us to account for uncertainty, we can produce a plan to get us to the target, despite the tumble."

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