Despinning Orbital Debris Before Docking Using Laser Ablation

摘要

Many regions of Earth orbit are ideal for satellites that provide commonly used services, including communication, television, and navigation. However, defunct satellites, spent upper stages, and other space debris are crowding these vital regions of space, resulting in the need for methods for their removal. For remediation methods that depend on docking with the debris, eliminating the residual spin of the debris before docking is desirable, and perhaps necessary. The purpose of this work is to model the use of laser ablation to despin large space debris objects before surface contact. With a three-dimensional surface mesh of a known debris geometry, an assumed initial spin for the debris, and an offboard location for the laser, a targeting algorithm computes which faces are targetable at each instant based on geometric constraints. The location that generates the most desirable change in angular momentum is then targeted at each instant while integrating the equations of motion over time. The effects of nonoptimal targeting distance, incidence angle, surface ablation physics, and laser power are considered in the evaluation of total time to despin the debris object. It is shown that the time required to despin a representative object with a 250 W pulsed laser is on the order of days.