Protecting the near-Earth orbital environment from collisions with space debris, in particular through orbit modification strategies, is becoming a major issue for the development of space activities. Beyond cataloguing and tracking space debris, more recent concepts aim to act on debris in orbit using ground-based lasers, which can impart a small, cumulative velocity change to non-manoeuvrable targets. The LARAMOTIONS study [1] proposed and quantified the velocity change per engagement required to significantly reduce the collision risk. The ADAMO project (High Power Adaptive Optics for Laser Momentum Transfer), funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), aims to design an adaptive optics (AO) architecture capable of meeting these requirements, and to build demonstrators proving the feasibility of a future, fully operational system. This presentation will address the performance capabilities and limitations of a complete laser momentum transfer adaptive optics (LMTAO) system for space debris orbit modification, using a rotating CubeSat model of the debris for the light–matter interaction. The study also quantifies the momentum transferred by the laser to the debris along its trajectory.
[1] Stefan Scharring, Heiko Dreyer, Gerd Wagner, Jürgen Kästel, Paul Wagner, Ewan Schafer, Wolfgang Riede,
Christoph Bamann, Urs Hugentobler, Pawel Lejba, et al. LARAMOTIONS : a conceptual study on laser networks
for near-term collision avoidance for space debris in the low Earth orbit. Applied Optics, 60(31):H24–H36, 2021.
