Analysis of manoeuvring strategies and relative navigation for multi-step rendezvous toward uncooperative target

The paper focuses on guidance and relative navigation aspects in the framework of an Active Debris Removal mission. Specifically, an original multi-step strategy, inspired by the one designed for the OSAM-1 mission, is proposed to perform rendezvous toward an uncooperative target reaching a relative distance suitable for monitoring using Electro-Optical sensors. At each step, passive safety is guaranteed by setting pre-defined regions of interest that cannot be breached by the chaser until the mission control on ground provides an Authority-to-Proceed command. As regards the navigation aspects, particular attention is paid to the problem of obtaining highly accurate relative state estimates in close-proximity conditions using a LIDAR. Finally, an ad-hoc reconfiguration strategy is proposed to keep the chaser within a limited along-track distance from the target. The reconfiguration manoeuvre is commanded on the basis of the LIDAR-based relative state estimates. Performance assessment is carried out by means of numerical simulations.