Lorenzo Bucci

Politecnico di Milano | Polimi · Department of Aerospace Engineering

In 2018, the International Space Exploration Coordination Group proposed international agreements on space exploration: expand human presence into the Solar System, with the surface of Mars as a common driving goal and prepare for space exploration missions beginning with the ISS and continuing to the lunar vicinity, the lunar surface, then on to M...

Fragmentation events are the most common source of artificial debris in space. Such events can happen for multiple reasons, ranging from collisions with active or inactive objects to propellant tanks or battery explosions. They are an inherent part of human activities in space, regardless of the location. At the same time, the interest in the Moon...

Access to the Moon surface is a cornerstone of the recently published ESA Terrae Novae 2030+ Strategy Roadmap. European industrial studies of such a capability starting as early as 2016 have converged to a medium-sized multi-mission lander enabled by the significant lunar capability of Ariane 64: The European Large Logistic Lander (EL3). EL3 is a M...

Nowadays, the issue of space debris is becoming central to any operation in space. Future lunar exploration missions won't be exempted from this issue, with the aggravating factor of operating in a gravitational multi-body chaotic environment. Debris-related analyses often involve propagating numerous trajectories independent from each other. These...

The interest in Moon exploration has grown substantially in the last few years, appointing the Moon as the first step toward deep space exploration. However, the current state-of-the-art approach for lunar landing does not always reach the required performance levels. This contribution presents a potential implementation of a dedicated lunar commun...

The interest in Moon exploration has substantially grown in the latest years, positioning the Moon as an attractive testbed to develop the required technologies and capabilities for human Deep Space exploration. In past decades, lunar missions have almost entirely relied on Direct-to-Earth (DTE) communications, whilst using ranging radiometric meas...

Global access to the Moon surface is one of the key capabilities/services that the European Space Agency intends to master by the second half of this decade as part of an overall effort to extend its LEO (Low Earth Orbit) capabilities toward Mars exploration but also in answer to the unique opportunities linked to the foreseen lunar economic develo...

The Moon appears to be the next, natural step in the exploration of the Solar System. Human lunar activity will soon increase significantly: plans for an orbiting international laboratory in the Moon's vicinity, the "Gateway", are now well established together with surface exploration missions, and the coming years will seemingly experience a stead...

Recent studies highlighted the benefits of a support infrastructure located in Cislunar environment, which would ease the design of forthcoming space missions with a favorable access from and to the lunar surface, the Earth and many interplanetary destinations. Multi-body orbits rose a peculiar interest and were selected to stage a human-robotic ex...

Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits (NRHO) have been recently identified as suitable location for a cislunar space station, to orbit in the Earth–Moon vicinity and offer long-term infrastructural services to manned and unmanned missions to the Moon and further. Indeed, to reliably perform rendezvous and docking/undocking phases between space vehicles orbi...

Interest on Large Space Structures (LSS), orbiting in strategic and possibly long-term stable locations, is nowadays increasing in the space community. LSS can serve as strategic outpost to support a variety of manned and unmanned mission, or may carry scientific payloads for astronomical observations. The paper focuses on analysing LSS in the Eart...

The family of Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits (NRHO) is a promising staging location for future missions to the Moon and to the solar system. Many recent researches proved the effectiveness of such orbits as staging locations, thanks to their low station-keeping cost and low access $\Delta v$; the family also provides cheap transfer possibilities to L...

Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits (NRHO) are a potential candidate for future exploration missions, due to their appealing features. They guarantee a large visibility window from Earth, low delta-v access requirements, low station keeping costs, and cheap access to the lunar surface, thus proving effective as staging orbits for lunar support orbiting in...

The research discusses the analytical solution for the planar attitude dynamics of a rigid body, located at an equilibrium point of the Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem. The dynamics equations are compared to the nonlinear dynamics of a swinging pendulum, for which literature offers the exact solution; such solution is thus adapted and employ...

Interest on Large Space Structures (LSS), orbiting in strategic and possibly long-term stable locations, is nowadays increasing in the space community. LSS can serve as strategic outpost to support a variety of manned and unmanned mission, or may carry scientific payloads to broaden the knowledge of our universe. The paper is devoted to the analysi...

The topic of the paper is the investigation of Large Space Structures coupled dynamics, whenever located in a Circular Restricted Three-Body Problem (CR3BP) framework. The configuration design/6 DOF dynamics coupling is deeply investigated to, eventually, drive the infrastructure system and operational design. Because of the wideness of possible pr...

A new analytical formulation is presented to approach low-thrust trajectories design, in the framework of a guidance law definition for an automated spacecraft to rendezvous and serve multiple active targets. The formulation exploits polar coordinates, avoiding the need of either Keplerian or equinoctial elements. To minimize the low thrust maneuve...

The paper presents the feasibility study results for a mission devoted to refuel satellites in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO), with a fuel-tug robotic system, capable of autonomously maneuvering both in proximity of the targets and in the phasing trajectories. The fuel transfer system and interface is designed considering a xenon-based propulsion...

Robotic On-Orbiting Servicing (OOS) is a relevant technology development and research topic within the space community being the solution to increase the already in orbit active platforms flexibility and exploitability during and over their nominal lifetime. Within the broad OOS domain, the robotic refueling capability is definitely attractive as i...