Orbital Servicing Tug: Detumble & Graveyard Reboost

Robotic orbital tugs are the emerging fix for the GEO graveyard-disposal problem: a defunct satellite drifts, tumbling, with no propellant left to retire itself, so a servicer vehicle rendezvouses, grapples it, and does the job in two very different physics regimes. First it must cancel the client's residual spin with RCS torque — a rigid-body angular-momentum problem, L = Iω — because firing a main engine into an off-axis spin would tumble the whole stack. Only once ω is near zero does the tug ignite its low-thrust electric engine and spiral the combined mass outward along the true near-circular low-thrust transfer relation (dε/dt = a·v) until it reaches the IADC-recommended graveyard orbit roughly 300 km above GEO. Every quantity on the telemetry panel — spin rate, angular momentum, altitude offset and Δv — is computed from the real equations, just compressed in time so an hours-long burn plays out in front of you.