Speaker
Description
The detumbler adventure started more than 5 years ago at Airbus DS, through the ingenious ideas of our senior dynamic / AOCS expert Kristen Lagadec. This small, passive, low mass and affordable equipment is aimed at detumbling and / or prevent a dead spacecraft from spinning, thanks to the Earth magnetic field in Low Earth orbits, creating Eddy currents between a rotor equipped with two magnets freely rotating inside a conductive stator attached to the spacecraft structure. We strongly believe that this equipment will become a game changer for facilitating future Active Debris Removal (ADR) missions for targets failing to comply with debris mitigation rules, due to failures or other reasons. Indeed, the number one factor of cost, complexity and risk of an ADR mission is the tumbling motion of the target, which prevents to envisage an easy and robust capture, whatever the concept.
This presentation will describe the current status of several products linked to the detumbler concept, currently in different development phases at Airbus DS :
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The detumbler-M (for Medium) product qualification campaign is in
progress (with the support of CNES) and first Flight models
production is foreseen in 2026, as well as a potential in-orbit
demonstration -
The detumbler-L (for Large) is being prototyped and will be tested up
to TRL4/5, in the frame of the ESA study “EOL PASSIVE DETUMBLING
SERVICE FOR REMOVAL OF NOT OPERATIVE SATELLITES IN LEO/MEO/GEO
ORBITS - EXPRO PLUS”. This detumbler will enlarge the
applicability domain of the detumbler-M towards more massive
spacecraft and higher orbit altitudes -
Finally, a system concept named IDEFIXS, for In-orbit DEtumbler
FIXing System, which will enable to fix a detumbler on a derelict
spacecraft already in orbit and tumbling, is been matured through
internal R&D funding. This innovative concept might well be another
game changer for facilitating ADR missions of large debris already in
orbit, for example the ones in the top 50 list that are considered
the most dangerous for debris proliferation in case of collision,
knowing that removing all of them would allow to decrease the
probability of the Kessler syndrome occurrence by ~60%....