The ion beam shepherd is an innovative contactless technique for space debris removal, in which an impulse transfer thruster pushes the debris object through the action of a plasma plume and an impulse compensation thruster maintains formation ying. The optimal operational point of both thrusters strongly depends on their characteristics and on the physics of the plasma plume expansion into vacuum. With the use of dedicated thruster performance models, complemented with simplied plume expansion and plasma-debris interaction models, a system-level optimization study of the impulse transfer thruster alone and of the overall electric propulsion subsystem is presented for an ion beam shepherd mission example. An optimum design point is found for minimum overall power consumption in both cases.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.