Analysis and determination of capture area for space debris removal based on reachable domain

In this paper, the problem of capture area determination for space debris removal is investigated. A new method to calculate the capture area based on the reachable domain approach is proposed. The capture area refers to the intersections of the debris orbit and maneuvering coverage of the capture unit. A large number of capture units are initially deployed on a cleaner platform, which is assumed to move on a circular orbit and provide on-orbit secondary launch for the capture units. First, the highly nonlinear equations for the boundary of capture area are formulated. Second, the evaluation criteria of capture area existence are established. Two cases corresponding to the maximum value of the geocentric distance difference are analyzed. Furthermore, a computation algorithm to calculate the boundary points of the capture area is proposed. An optimization method is employed to solve the highly nonlinear equations instead of the conventional Newton iteration method. The simulation results show that the calculated capture area coincides exactly with the actual intersections of the capture unit’s maneuvering coverage and the debris orbit, demonstrating the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method.