e.Cube Mission: the Environmental CubeSat

The e.Cube mission aims at contributing to the advancement of technologies and methodologies dedicated to space debris mitigation and remediation (1) to increase spacecraft autonomy in performing CAMs, (2) to support space debris modelling with in-orbit collected data about non-trackable fragment objects, (3) to characterise the atmosphere for more accurate re-entry predictions and the thermomechanical loads experienced by the spacecraft during re-entry. This paper presents the preliminary mission analysis, payload selection and system design for the mission.