Speaker
Description
The sustained growth of large, defunct spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) represents a
major challenge to the long-term sustainability of critical orbital regimes. As a result, there
has been growing interest in Active Debris Removal (ADR) services targeting large LEO debris
objects. The ESA’s Clean Space initiative has been pioneering the study of ADR since 2012,
and ESA has placed ADR at the core of its Space Safety and Zero Debris strategies, which
aim to achieve debris neutrality by 2030.
Within this context, the ERASE Project Phase 0 investigates the feasibility and design drivers
of a European ADR servicer capable of safely rendezvousing with, capturing, and disposing of large, unprepared and uncooperative spacecraft.
For the ERASE project, The Exploration Company (TEC) is leading a consortium with SENER,
SpaceApplications, and D-Orbit, with supplier support from Jena-Optronik, ArcSpace, and Vimotek.
The mission objective is to consolidate the design of a space servicer capable of performing
ADR operations for large, unprepared, and uncooperative LEO targets. Within the scope of
the project, dedicated case studies are being conducted for METOP and SENTINEL satellite
families. These satellites are multi-ton-class spacecraft in SSO whose long orbital lifetimes
present significant collision and fragmentation risks. Both are treated as uncooperative and
unprepared, without reliance on attitude control, cooperative navigation aids, or dedicated
capture interfaces.
The project is structured around three main working domains.
The first domain focuses on requirements management. Activities include the derivation
and consolidation of customer needs, followed by the definition and refinement of mission,
system, subsystem, and interface requirements, with particular emphasis on safety,
debris-mitigation compliance, and design-to-cost constraints. This work aims to establish
a coherent and traceable requirement baseline supporting the mission objectives.
The second domain addresses the in-orbit servicer spacecraft design. Within ERASE, TEC’s Oura platform is planned to be adapted to the mission objectives. The Oura servicer isalready under maturation within ESA’s FLPP InSPoC-1 project. Under the ERASE scope, the
platform design, technical budgets, and interfaces will be further adapted for the METOP
TEC - INTERNAL
TEC - INTERNAL
and SENTINEL case studies while maintaining a scalable servicer architecture reusable for
future ADR missions.
The third and most mission-critical domain focuses on the preliminary end-to-end mission architecture and ConOps, focusing on capture strategy for uncooperative and unprepared
targets. This work includes the definition of Rendezvous, Proximity Operations and Docking
(RPOD) concept and approach corridors, including safety and abort strategy considerations.
The activities also cover the establishment of velocity and error budgets across rendezvous,
proximity operations, final approach, and contact phases. In parallel, critical subsystem
trade-offs are being performed to identify enabling technologies and maturity gaps related
to contact dynamics modelling, capture end-effector concepts, and Fault Detection,
Isolation and Recovery (FDIR) logic. Based on these activities, a roadmap is being defined to
support the de-risking and maturation of the required technologies for future mission
phases.
Expected outcomes of ERASE include a credible preliminary ADR servicer architecture,
consolidated requirements and budgets, identified technology maturity gaps, and a roadmap toward a 2031 demonstration mission