Collision Risk Assessment During Spacecraft Ultra-Close Range De-tumbling for Arbitrarily Shaped Spinning Debris

On-orbit services for large noncooperative debris have significant benefits for the sustainable development of the aerospace industry. However, the tumble motion and various shapes of debris seriously threaten the implementation of on-orbit service technology. This article takes the ultra-close range eddy current de-tumbling scenario as an example and proposes a quantitative collision risk assessment method named the Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based collision risk assessment to ensure the safety of ultra-close range operation. In this method, the inertial-oriented keep-out zone is employed to deal with the tumble motion of debris. The GMM is utilized to construct precise keep-out zones for the arbitrarily shaped debris and the chaser. Then, a collision incidence function is defined to quantitatively depict the collision risk between the debris and the chaser. Besides, the collision detection criterion is given by the threshold of the collision incidence. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted, and the effectiveness of the proposed schemes is verified.