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Projecte llegit

Títol: A preliminary study of space debris mitigation based on a swinging tether system

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: ARIAS CALDERÓN, SANTIAGO

Departament: FIS

Títol: A preliminary study of space debris mitigation based on a swinging tether system

Data inici oferta: 03-02-2021     Data finalització oferta: 03-10-2021


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    GR ENG SIST AEROESP
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Paraules clau:
Space debris, Modeling, Collision, Space tether, swinging tether
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
Space debris is increasingly becoming a threat to the operational life of satellites and manned/unmanned space vehicles orbiting planet Earth. This project aims to study and discuss some possible theoretical solutions proposed during the past decades that focus on space debris mitigation. The main goal of this work is to explore some new strategies for the good design of a space debris removal mission.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
Since the very beginning of sending satellites into space with Sputnik 1 in 1957, humankind
has been repeatedly and nonchalantly sending more and more spacecrafts outside the
atmosphere without caring at first the future repercussions of that. Space junk or debris
are what the remains of all the inoperative missions are called. The rise in quantity is not
only relevant in the field of space exploration, but is in the long run is a problem that would
affect our daily lives and even the state of planet Earth.

This is not an unaware problem, as many space agencies started handling this issue in
an indirect way by making their space missions with extra shielded parts to be positive
that no external debris will damage their missions. Moreover, recently some space debris
detection methods have been developed, as well as space laws that recommends some
extra steps in space missions that adds to the idea of prevention and to try and not add to
the number of orbiting debris.

A more direct approach is also discussed, where several debris removal solutions will
be presented and at the end one of them is selected: the tether system. Thereafter,
a schematic of the system will be presented, its equations of motion obtained, and the
optimal point to release the debris into a lower orbit to disintegrate it will be the overall
objective of this study.

At the end, the initial conditions for the system will be added, and with that several graphs
and conclusions will be discussed. Three of these initial conditions will be subjected to
some iterations to see the degree of how the whole system is affected by those variations
of the input parameters.

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