Giacomo Borelli

Politecnico di Milano | Polimi · Department of Aerospace Engineering

In recent years, the interest in proximity operations to uncooperative and non-collaborative objects has been growing and and demanding for specific technology advances to tackle these challenging cases of in-orbit servicing and removal missions. Indeed, these architectures hold a crucial role in guaranteeing future sustainable and efficient space...

Autonomous spacecraft proximity operations represent a key enabler for future mission architectures such as in-orbit servicing, active debris removal, object inspection, and in-orbit assembly. This work addresses safety concepts for the relative trajectory guidance design applicable to challenging proximity operations in the close-range domain. The...

Space Eye (SpEye) is a two-satellite technology demonstration mission aimed at validating crucial technologies and methodologies essential for advanced on-orbit inspection and formation-flying. This initiative holds significant relevance for the development of future operational nano-satellite capabilities and missions. The primary objective of the...

This work presents the development of the navigation and control subsystems of a guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system for controlling an autonomous satellite, called chaser, equipped with a redundant manipulator. In the study, the capture operations of a target spacecraft and its stabilization are considered. The control function employs a...

In recent years, missions such as JAXA's Hayabusa2 and NASA's OSIRIS-Rex have visited Near Earth Asteroids, explored their environments, and collected samples from these primordial Solar System bodies. Their physical composition is largely unknown and challenging to predict from ground observations. That is why sample collection from such bodies is...

The space community is moving forward the development of in-orbit servicing and removal technologies to enable the circular economy in space and improve the future space missions' scientific and commercial return and space environment exploitation. The exploitation of nanosatel-lites to perform proximity operation represents a further opportunity t...

In-orbit servicing, transportation and removal activities are on the way to revolutionize the space economy and space exploitation. Particularly for the near-Earth environment these activities are considered important in the near- and long-term future to ensure the sustainability of space activities. In this paper one of the many challenges facing...

Autonomous spacecraft proximity operations represent a key enabler for future mission architectures such as in-orbit servicing, active debris removal, objects' inspection, and in-orbit assembly. This work addresses safety concepts for the relative trajectory guidance design applicable to challenging proximity operations in the close-range domain. T...

The paper describes the design and modelling of an on-orbit mission experiment for testing a novel engine technology in Space. The goal is to assess the novel engine thrust profile through an on-orbit reverse engineering approach. The simulation tool developed at Politecnico di Milano is initially designed to propagate the free attitude dynamics of...

Large constellations' deployment in low Earth orbit will drastically change the space environment and economy in the upcoming decades. The sustainability of the orbital environment in the long term needs to be accounted when implementing the large constellations projects. In fact, failures among the large constellations' assets can critically endan...

The potentialities of In-Orbit Servicing (IOS) to extend the operational life of satellites and the need to implement Active Debris Removal (ADR) to effectively tackle the space debris problem are well known among the space community. Research on technical solutions to enable this class of missions is thriving, also pushed by the development of new...

One of the ways to harmonise large constellation deployment trends with the space sustainability is through the responsible behaviour by operators to follow space debris mitigation guidelines. On the other hand, there is no doubt, a removal service will be needed for removing failed satellites. Within the Sunrise project a consortium composed of D-...

In the framework of Active Debris Removal (ADR) missions employing rigid capture mechanism, the rotational state of the target object greatly influences the feasibility, safety and cost of the capture operations. In this work, the impingement with thruster’s plume gases is studied as a strategy to control the target tumbling motion and aid the fina...

The semi-analytical treatment of spacecraft's perturbed orbits can be used to interpret and evaluate efficiently its orbit evolution. The present study proposes a semi-analytical methodology to design continuous low thrust multi-revolutions manoeuvres in the mean orbital elements phase space introducing an artificial perturbation formulated as dist...