Review on solar sail technology

Gong, Shengping; Macdonald, Malcolm

doi:10.1007/s42064-019-0038-x

Cited by 100 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 114 publications

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“…In recent years, solar-sail technology has been successfully applied to various missions, such as the Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency [2], the LightSail-1 mission by the Planetary Society [3], and NanoSail-D by NASA [4]. Due to advantageous applications in space mission design [5], solar-sail orbits around the libration points become more attractive: especially in novel orbit construction [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”

Section: Nomenclaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Novel Subharmonic Resonance Periodic Orbits of a Solar Sail in Earth–Moon System

Qian

Liu

Yang

et al. 2019

Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics

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Section: Nomenclaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Novel Subharmonic Resonance Periodic Orbits of a Solar Sail in Earth–Moon System

Qian

Liu

Yang

et al. 2019

Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics

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“…Recently, many researchers have pointed out that on-orbit assembly is the most likely solution to this issue with support from various technologies of space robots and modular structure designs (Dorsey and Watson, 2016;Duan, 2018;She et al, 2019;Wang and Hou, 2014). Some preliminary results (Boning and Dubowsky, 2010;Gong and Macdonald, 2019;Wang et al, 2019) have clearly demonstrated that undesirable vibration may be excited when constructing the LSS, significantly influencing its orbit and attitude motion. It illustrates that the active vibration suppression is one of the most important technical issues to be solved for the LSS during on-orbit assembly (Duan, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Active vibration suppression for large space structure assembly: A distributed adaptive model predictive control approach

Wang

Xun³

et al. 2020

Journal of Vibration and Control

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Subject to the limited envelope size and carrying capacity of a rocket, it could be one of the most promising solutions to construct a large space structure through multilaunching and on-orbit assembly. Taking the antenna of the solar power satellite as the research objective, a novel vibration suppression strategy is developed in this article to guarantee high structural stability of the large space structure during on-orbit assembly. The concept of distributed control unit, together with the varying location relationship matrices, reflects the structural characteristics of the large space structure during on-orbit assembly. The explicit expression form of the control unit’s dynamic model is first derived based on the Newmark-β method. Then, the distributed adaptive model predictive controller is proposed to suppress the vibration of the large space structure aroused by weak impact among assembling modules. Through recalculating the control matrices efficiently at each assembly, the proposed controller achieves adaptive updating along with the varying large space structure. The feasibility of the proposed distributed adaptive model predictive controller is investigated in the numerical simulations, and the centralized fast model predictive controller is adopted for better comparison. The results demonstrate that the distributed adaptive model predictive controller can effectively suppress vibration of the large space structure during on-orbit assembly, with good adaptability, robustness, and computation efficiency.

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“…In this case, the thrust profile is derived such that a given trajectory may be followed by the spacecraft. For example, the possibility of generating a logarithmic spiral trajectory was first investigated by Bacon [18] and Tsu [19], the latter suggesting the use of solar sails [20][21][22]. In fact, a solar sail can travel along a logarithmic spiral with a constant attitude with respect to the Sun-spacecraft line, as thoroughly discussed by Bassetto et al [23], who focused on the requirements to be met to place a spacecraft in a logarithmic spiral trajectory without any impulsive maneuver.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This type of thrusters includes all the propellantless propulsion systems that provide an outward radial propulsive acceleration with a magnitude that scales as a certain power of the Sunspacecraft distance. Electric solar wind sails (E-sails) [33][34][35][36][37], magnetic sails (magsails) [38][39][40][41][42], solar sails [20][21][22], and smart dusts (SDs) [43,44] belong to this class of propulsion systems. Each of them exploits a peculiar form of energy coming from the Sun.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spiral trajectories induced by radial thrust with applications to generalized sails

et al. 2020

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In this study, new analytical solutions to the equations of motion of a propelled spacecraft are investigated using a shape-based approach. There is an assumption that the spacecraft travels a two-dimensional spiral trajectory in which the orbital radius is proportional to an assigned power of the spacecraft angular coordinate. The exact solution to the equations of motion is obtained as a function of time in the case of a purely radial thrust, and the propulsive acceleration magnitude necessary for the spacecraft to track the prescribed spiral trajectory is found in a closed form. The analytical results are then specialized to the case of a generalized sail, that is, a propulsion system capable of providing an outward radial propulsive acceleration, the magnitude of which depends on a given power of the Sun-spacecraft distance. In particular, the conditions for an outward radial thrust and the required sail performance are quantified and thoroughly discussed. It is worth noting that these propulsion systems provide a purely radial thrust when their orientation is Sun-facing. This is an important advantage from an engineering point of view because, depending on the particular propulsion system, a Sun-facing attitude can be stable or obtainable in a passive way. A case study is finally presented, where the generalized sail is assumed to start the spiral trajectory from the Earth’s heliocentric orbit. The main outcome is that the required sail performance is in principle achievable on the basis of many results available in the literature.

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Review on solar sail technology

Cited by 100 publications

References 114 publications

Novel Subharmonic Resonance Periodic Orbits of a Solar Sail in Earth–Moon System

Novel Subharmonic Resonance Periodic Orbits of a Solar Sail in Earth–Moon System

Active vibration suppression for large space structure assembly: A distributed adaptive model predictive control approach

Spiral trajectories induced by radial thrust with applications to generalized sails

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