Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    SATELLITE SERVICING AS A MEANS TO INCREASE SPACE MISSION RESILIENCE IN LOW EARTH ORBIT: A PARAMETRIC ARCHITECTURE ANALYSIS
    (2023) Gabriel, Jonathon Loegan; Akin, David L; Aerospace Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Satellite servicing and associated capabilities have the potential to establish a new space mission design and operation paradigm throughout Earth orbit. By integrating fundamental elements of the logistics chains that complex engineered systems enjoy on Earth’s surface to Earth’s orbit, the feasible domain for space missions will significantly expand. Some estimates suggest that the burgeoning satellite servicing industry could generate over 14 billion United States Dollars in revenue over the next decade, driven in large part by growing demand from satellite operators in Low Earth Orbit. However, despite significant economic development and the modern shift of commercial and government space industry focus to Low Earth Orbit, the study of satellite servicing architecture design in this context requires more analysis to mature. Existing satellite servicing mission design literature generally investigates the system design problem as an economic feasibility analysis or system optimization problem. A subpopulation of this literature introduces novel design metrics to the system design process, such as mission flexibility, bringing significant utility to mission designers. In recent years, mission resilience has proven to be a space mission design metric of significant interest to a diverse set of stakeholders such as the United States Department of Defense. Despite its rapidly expanding use, resilience in the context of space mission design has been described primarily qualitatively, limiting its engineering use. Satellite servicing, as with other applications of engineering resilience techniques, aims to integrate capabilities into a complex system that enables a response to system degradation in a favorable manner. This thesis develops a robust simulation framework to parametrically investigate the Low Earth Orbit satellite servicing system design space in the context of scenarios of interest, such as the potentially degrading events of solar storms, orbital debris collisions, and natural satellite failures. A focus will be placed on quantifying the effects on system resilience that satellite servicing can afford Low Earth Orbit constellations. First-order space mission design parameters will be parametrically investigated using the developed analysis and simulation framework. Through leveraging the Earth’s J2 perturbation to help route servicer satellites efficiently throughout a constellation of modeled customer satellites, it will be shown that the integration of satellite servicing capabilities into Low Earth Orbit constellations can significantly increase system resilience inside the performance constraints of existing space vehicles. Satellite Servicing system design strategies will be presented that can be employed to increase mission resilience and feasibility.
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    A Graph Transformation Method for Robotic Satellite Servicing Down-Selection
    (2017) Knizhnik, Jessica; Austin, Mark; Systems Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    As remote robotic space satellite servicing technologies develop, each servicer satellite will need to account for a number of servicing scenarios and consider a variety of alternate design solutions to best meet the most servicing scenario requirements. This thesis presents a graph transformation method for systematically down-selecting the number of design options available, and highlighting trade-offs in sets of design solutions which best meet satellite servicing task requirements while also reducing total mass, maximum power needed and servicing time. The proposed method successfully identifies for further consideration several best design solutions from a set of approximately 10,000 potential solutions in the first test case examined, and from a set of approximately 2*1026 in the second test case examined.