Space Debris Hazards and Removal Methods – An Overview

Abstract

Space junk is particularly common in Earth’s orbit and includes abandoned spacecraft, stranded launch vehicle stages, mission-related waste, and disintegration debris from the destruction of uninhibited missile launchers and spacecraft. Striping off this debris will be more effective than performing collision avoidance manoeuvres that would take hours and need a substantial amount of propellant since the optimisation of tracking and location prediction of debris is obscure. In this paper, a comprehensive study of space debris is presented which includes serious threats offered by space junk, and working techniques developed in the past eight years to remove space waste. The recent techniques of debris removal and all their possible deviations are investigated and explained with illustrations. The purpose of this paper is to incorporate in a single platform all the efficient strategies of debris removal adopted in the last 8 years, and the techniques used till 2015 are tabulated. Copyright © 2024 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.