An independent research practice working on the physics of orbital debris removal and small-body surface dynamics — before committing to hardware.
The debris environment in low Earth orbit is dominated not by large trackable objects but by a vast population of centimetre- and millimetre-scale fragments. A 1 cm piece of debris travelling at orbital velocity carries the kinetic energy of a car at highway speed — enough to disable or destroy any operational spacecraft.
The problem is not ignorance of the risk. It is that no removal approach yet developed is cheap enough to operate at the scale the problem demands.
Every mission concept starts with a physics model, not a prototype. We build computational tools to characterise the debris environment — size, tumble rate, material composition proxies — before committing to any hardware path. The goal is to fail cheaply on paper, not expensively in orbit.
Contact-based capture fails when you don't know what you're touching. We study non-contact interaction methods — electrostatic, photon pressure, plume impingement — that work on targets with unknown attitude and surface state. Current work is entirely analytical and simulation-based.
Small bodies — asteroids, comet nuclei — are not solid rocks. They are rubble piles held together by gravity so weak that a walking pace exceeds escape velocity. Surface operations on these objects are dominated by regolith dynamics, boulder clustering, and granular flows that behave nothing like terrestrial soil. Understanding these mechanics is a prerequisite for any small-body mission.
