Drag and Solar Sail Deorbiting: Re-Entry Time Versus Cumulative Collision Probability

Solar and drag sailing have been proposed as passive end-of-life deorbiting methods, and technological demonstrators are under development. For orbit above 800 km altitude solar radiation pressure can be exploited for increasing the orbit eccentricity until the perigee enters the drag region until final re-entry. The performance of the sailing strategy is determined by four parameters: the required effective area-to-mass ratio to deorbit the spacecraft, which determine the sail size given the satellite’s mass, the time to deorbit and the augmented collision probability caused on and by the sail through its passage in the Low Earth Orbit protected region densely populated by space debris. In this paper we assess the sail dimension with respect to the augmented collision risk depending on the sail area and the deorbiting time.