Abstract: Electrodynamic tethered deorbit technology is a novel way to remove abandoned spacecrafts like upper stages or unusable satellites. This paper investigates and analyses the deorbit performance and mission applicability of the electrodynamic tethered system. To do so, the electrodynamic tethered deorbit dynamics with multi-perturbation is firstly formulated, where the Earth magnetic field, the atmospheric drag, and the Earth oblateness effect are considered. Then, the key system parameters, including payload mass, tether length and tether type, are analyzed by numerical simulations to investigate their influences on the deorbit performance and to give the setting principles for choosing system parameters. Based on this and given an appropriate group of system parameters, numerical simulations are undertaken to study the impact of the mission parameters, including orbit height and orbit inclination, and thus to investigate the mission applicability of the electrodynamic tethered deorbit technology.

Key words: Electrodynamic tethered deorbit technology, Dynamics modeling, Performance analysis