Orbital Debris Removal System (2011)

This project tackles one of four Request for Proposals (RFPs) which are provided to the final year students completing the Aerospace Engineering Degree programme. This paper presents a solution to an RFP which comes from the 2011 AIAA Group Design Student Paper Competition, challenging the students to design a way to reduce or overcome the issue of space debris.

As part of the project, I chose to focus on the problem of the space debris environment and to determine which debris the group should focus on targeting. I also focused on looking the orbital mechanics of the problem and trying to determine the best mission or operation for our objective. To do this, I utilized numerous programs including NASA's Debris Assessment Software (DAS) v2.0, NASA's Orbital Debris Engineering Model (ORDEM2000), Orbitron v3.71, Space Trajectory Analysis v3.0, AGI's Satellite Tool Kit v9.2.2, and MATLAB.

This topic was also submitted to the AIAA Student Paper Competition in 2011.