Post mission disposal design: Dynamics and applications

This research addresses post mission disposal design techniques with particular attention to long-term evolution of spacecraft orbits. Semianalytical dynamics models for orbital perturbations are developed to filter out short-periodic perturbation effects and more importantly to improve computational efficiency when dynamics models are integrated in the manoeuvre optimisation problem. The disposal of a spacecraft targeting an Earth re-entry is attained by employing natural orbital perturbations and enhancing natural effects with impulsive manoeuvres. Hamiltonian representations of the system are used to analyse dynamics behaviours and to validate the solutions obtained from optimisation processes.