The near‐Earth space is crowded by thousands of debris of all sizes, originating from old satellites and launch vehicle stages abandoned in orbit. In order to stabilize the debris population, it is necessary to remove the largest ones at the rate of at least five per year. The cleaning program consists of launching a series of identical vehicles, each tasked with capturing and deorbiting five debris. This leads to a mixed continuous/combinatorial time‐dependent problem, where the debris choice, the capture times, and the transfer maneuver must be simultaneously optimized. This problem is solved by a simulated annealing algorithm using a grid of precomputed matrices to interpolate the transfer costs between debris.
Space Debris Cleaning
Space Trajectories ; 275-297
2024-12-24
23 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
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