End-Of-Life De-Orbiting Strategies for Satellites

Active post-mission disposal of space structures will have an increased importance in the future in order to keep the Earth orbit in an acceptable condition for the safe operation of manned and unmanned missions. The objective of the performed European Space Agency study on End-of-Life (EoL-) de-orbiting Strategies was to provide an overview and assessment of propulsion-related methods to de-orbit spacecraft in LEO, or spacecraft which pass through LEO, to assess their applicability to different spacecraft-mission combinations and to establish a know-how basis of End-of-Life de-orbit strategies. The assessment strategy is demonstrated on the example of reference satellites.