Mission concepts which actively pursue large derelict spacecraft or rocket bodies were put forward by many organisations in the past in order to mitigate the increase in the amount of space debris. In order to perform the proximity operations required by most of these concepts, the chaser spacecraft requires an accurate knowledge of the target spacecraft states. Relative navigation - the determination of relative position and attitude states - has been clearly identified as a key critical technology for such missions. Many of the proposed solutions involve the combination of active and passive sensors to measure the absolute states of the chaser and the relative pose of the debris. An Extended-Kalman-Filter-based solution is proposed to meet these objectives. The solution has been designed and implemented in a high-fidelity end-to-end simulation environment in order to estimate the state estimation performance of the integrated hardware/software system in a realistic Low-Earth Orbit debris removal scenario. The paper provides an overview of the reference mission scenario, the state estimation system architectural design and the expected achievable performance for the reference design scenario. The paper also demonstrates that such an integrated system is not only applicable to rendezvous with an uncooperative target, but also to future autonomous deep-space docking and rendezvous missions. Performance estimates are also provided for a deep-space rendezvous mission at the Earth/Moon L2 point with a future manned space station.
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