Velocity-based detumbling strategy for a post-capture tethered net system

Abstract

Tether-net is known as a popular method to actively remove space debris. After successfully capturing a space debris object by a net, a tethered system consisting of a chaser satellite, a main tether and a target is formed. Since the most urgent and important task after capture is to avoid collision between the chaser and the tumbling target, detumbling of the target via the force by the main tether has to be performed. In this paper, we propose a novel and simple detumbling strategy to effectively stabilize the tethered system by controlling the motion of the chaser. Comparing to a previously proposed tension-based detumbling strategy, this newly proposed velocity-based method is simpler and more practical. Moreover, the fuel consumption of the proposed method is only 1% that of the tension-based method for investigated scenarios. With the proposed detumbling strategy, we not only analyze the influence of the system configuration on the detumbling effectiveness, but also analyze the detumbling capability of the method, concluding that the velocity-based detumbling strategy is able to detumble a spinning target up to 1.5 rad/s under a specific configuration. In addition, the proposed method is found to be suitable for both light and massive target detumbling.