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At present, the largest part of the catalogued space debris population consists of fragments originating from accidental explosions of spacecraft and upper stages, but it is expected that hypervelocity collisions involving large objects could become the primary source of new debris in the mid-term future. In this context, understanding the physical processes involved in spacecraft collisions is crucial, because these big impacts are one of the key drivers of the long-term evolution of the amount of space debris.

The main objective of this study 'DETUMBLING – Investigation of Active Detumbling Solutions for Debris Removal' was to propose and investigate a contact-based de-tumbling strategy using a robotic arm. Realistic models were developed for the chaser with robotic-arm, target and composite systems. Specific GNC strategies were developed for the different phases of the mission: robotic-arm deployment synchronisation with the target de-tumbling the composite.

This study addresses the problem of generating analytic approximations for spacecraft orbits in highly inhomogeneous gravitational fields. The project aims to develop an analytical tool that can be implemented algorithmically in standard symbolic software tools, such as Mathematica, or specialised algebraic tools, such as Piranha. The aim is to develop a general perturbative theory implementable in technical software that can rapidly generate orbits in highly inhomogeneous gravitational fields, for example, frozen orbits around asteroids for mission analysis.