End-of-life Earth re-entry for highly elliptical orbits: the INTEGRAL mission

This article presents the design of the end-of-life disposal of spacecraft in Highly Elliptical Orbits through Earth re-entry. The effect of luni-solar perturbations can be enhanced through impulsive maneuvers to move the spacecraft on a trajectory that will naturally evolve in the long-term towards Earth re-entry. The dynamics is propagated through semi-analytical averaging techniques, implemented in the PlanODyn suite. Moreover, the analytical approach to describe third-body perturbation by Kozai is used to validate the solution for optimal disposal maneuvers obtained through global optimization. For INTEGRAL mission, re-entry is possible with the available ?v onboard, provided that the orbital dynamics is wisely exploited to enhance the effects of the maneuver.