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Keywords:

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Abstract:

This paper presents the conceptual design of the separation system of the International Berthing and Docking Mechanism (IBDM), more extensively described in [1]. This separation system is capable of: - Safely deberthing and undocking vehicles weighing 5 to 80 ton - Minimizing the angular velocity of the separation vehicle to result in a pure translation. This paper contains the functional requirements of the separation system, the requirements for the separation mechanism and the conceptual design of the separation mechanism.