ION

The aim of the Orbital Sustainability (ION) impulse project is to address concepts and technologies for increasing sustainability in Earth orbit throughout the entire service life of satellites and orbital infrastructures. This is achieved by pooling cross-program expertise from space, security and aviation, particularly in the areas of satellite operation, robotics and automation, observation and measurement of space debris, space weather and experience in maintenance and repair in the aviation sector.

Space travel in Earth orbit plays a key role in current and future global developments. Satellite-based earth observation services for analyzing and forecasting weather and climate, communication and satellite navigation are experiencing rapid development worldwide. At the same time, there is an explosive commercialization and militarization of low-Earth orbit worldwide.  Satellites in orbit are not yet designed to be maintained or even repaired. Sustainability concepts for the construction and operation of satellites do not yet exist. Despite internationally recognized guidelines for the containment of space debris, technical standards and national space regulations, the actual number of missions that successfully carry out end-of-life operations is still far below the target (90% of the total number, according to ISO standard 24113).

In addition to DLR-SO, the following institutes are involved in the project:

The Orbital Sustainability impulse will first take a holistic view of the space ecosystem, addressing the short, medium and long-term goals that can be achieved in terms of sustainability and the circular economy. Relevant technologies will be analyzed that can be integrated into the orbital infrastructure sooner or later, such as

• Short term: space debris removal, life extension, inspection.
• Medium-term: repair, payload retrofit, on-site assembly.
• Long-term: recycling, orbital depots.

A concept for the sustainability and feasibility of the circular economy in orbit as well as an analysis of achievable goals and the identification of missing technologies and framework conditions will be developed. 
In addition, technology developments are being carried out to support sustainability in orbit. A main objective of these developments is to prepare the necessary functionalities for a mission scenario to be defined.  Another important goal of the project is to enable the interaction between the technologies for detecting, tracking and analyzing space debris on the ground and for approaching and capturing a target object. The new developments in space debris detection and analysis will result in new techniques that will be able to provide information on the target's rotation rate and direction of rotation to support the GNC and robotic systems to efficiently capture the target in orbit. To this end, prediction methods for a possible influence of solar activity on the rotation of the target will also be included.