Novel Solar-Sail Mission Concepts for High-Latitude Earth and Lunar Observation

Homo- and Heteroclinic Connections in the Planar Solar-Sail Earth-Moon Three-Body Problem

“…In recent years, the L 1 and L 2 libration points of the Earth-Moon system have drawn renewed interest as they hold potential to support future human space exploration activities. Such support may come in the form of landing missions [1,2], lunar farside communication capabilities [3,4], or as a gateway to more distant interplanetary destinations [1,5,6]. The natural motion around the libration points has been studied in great detail [7][8][9] and several families of (quasi-)periodic orbits around the libration points have been identified, e.g., Lissajous [10], Lyapunov [11], and halo [12] orbits, with more families in, for example, Kazantzis [13,14].…”

“…The addition of a solar-sail induced acceleration to the classical Earth-Moon three-body dynamics yields families of solar-sail planar and vertical Lyapunov, halo, and distant retrograde orbits [15,30] and allows new orbit families to arise with potential applications for high-latitude observation of the Earth and Moon [4]. In particular, the work in Heiligers et al [4] shows that a constellation of two sailcrafts in so-called clover-shaped orbits can achieve near-continuous coverage of the Earth's North Pole. If motion to the mirrored counterpart of this constellation can be achieved, a single solarsail mission may enable high-temporal resolution observations of both the North and South Poles, thereby significantly increasing the mission's scientific return.…”

Trajectory design for a solar-sail mission to asteroid 2016 HO3

“…Examples for the use of SEP include JAXA's asteroid sample return mission Hayabusa [3], NASA's Dawn mission that visited the two largest bodies in the asteroid belt [4], and ESA's BepiColombo mission to Mercury [5]. Examples of proposed high-energy solar-sail missions include NASA's NEA Scout mission [6], as well as a range of theoretical mission concepts such as the Solar Polar Orbiter [7], the Geostorm mission concept [8,9], the Interstellar Heliopause Probe [10], asteroid rendezvous missions [11,12], and, more generally, a wide range of highly non-Keplerian orbits for novel space applications [1,[13][14][15][16][17][18].…”

Solar-sail deep space trajectory optimization using successive convex programming

“…Early comparisons of solar sailing with chemical and ion propulsion systems showed that solar sails could match or outperform these systems for a range of mission applications, though the level of assumed technology status is of course crucial in such comparisons (MacNeal 1972). After being studied for several decades, a range of mission applications for solar sailing were proposed, such as interplanetary travel (Vulpetti et al 2015), space weather forecasting (Heiligers and Mcinnes 2014), planet sample return (Hughes et al 2006), earth and lunar observation (Heiligers et al 2018), and even applications for non-Keplerian orbits (Gong and Li 2015a;Heiligers et al 2016;McInnes 1999;Song et al 2016). The main fields of the study for solar sailing are divided into attitude maneuvers and orbit and trajectory design (Dachwald 2004;Gong and Li 2015b;McInnes 2004;Mengali and Quarta 2009;Wie and Murphy 2007;Zhukov and Lebedev 1964).…”