Single thruster control of the ion beam shepherd satellite to maintain its relative position

Abstract

The “ion beam shepherd” is a recently proposed concept for removing space debris in a contactless manner. A shepherd satellite must be controlled to move at a certain small distance in front of a space debris object during the de-orbiting phase. Because of the considerable duration of this phase, the propellant consumption is a key requirement for the control design. In this presentation, the in-plane relative position of the shepherd is maintained using a small thrust variation of the compensation thruster. To control the IBS relative motion in a direction perpendicular to the orbit plane, a small variation of the yaw angle is used. The estimations show that this control strategy is more efficient in terms of propellant consumption than the conventional approach with multiple chemical thrusters.