Solar Polar Orbiter: A Solar Sail Technology Reference Study

Artificial equilibrium points for a generalized sail in the circular restricted three-body problem

“…For example proposals for NASA's Millennium Space Technology 9 mission include solar sails that produce thrust on the order of 0.58 mm/s 2 to values as high as 1.70 mm/s 2 (Lichodzeijewski and Derbes, 2006). Moreover it is widely accepted (Macdonald et al, 2006;Ozimek et al, 2009) that for a near term solar sail technology a reasonable performance is a c = 0.5 − 1 mm/s 2 (β is on the order of 0.05 − 0.2), especially when non-Keplerian orbits and AEPs are considered (West, 2008). A second generation of solar sails (Leipold et al, 1999) will probably have a higher characteristic acceleration.…”

Technology Requirements of Exploration Beyond Neptune by Solar Sail Propulsion

“…For example, solar sail size or nominal mass versus radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) power density, or data rate from 200 AU. It is this novel and integrated approach to system design which identified a critical turning point in required sail size for the SPO mission [32] and which is used to minimize the Advancement Degree of Difficulty (AD2) [33] of the mission being considered. For example, the most significant technology requirement for the IHP mission is clearly the solar sail which has a high AD2, thus if the solar sail technology requirements can be reduced by increasing the demand on other, more mature, technologies which have a lower AD2 then the overall mission AD2 is reduced.…”

“…Noting that the IHP mission is often highlighted as an exemplar far-term solar sail mission [31], the disparity in required sail architecture is of critical importance to the development of solar sail technology. It is highly unlikely that even a successful mid-term solar sailing mission, such as Solar Polar Orbiter (SPO) [32], using a three-axis stabilized square solar sail architecture would provide much, if any, confidence to then progress to a spin-stabilized disc solar sail architecture for an IHP mission. As such, for a far-term solar sail mission such as IHP to be enabled the preceding missions [31][32][33][34] must act as enabling facilitators and must therefore develop the sail architecture required for far-term missions such as IHP.…”

Extension of Earth-Moon libration point orbits with solar sail propulsion

“…Despite limitations on the direction of thrust that a solar sail can generate, its propellant-less nature gives solar sailing great potential for long-duration and highenergy missions. Proposed ideas include near-to mid-term missions concepts such as orbits over the poles of the Sun for heliophysics (Macdonald et al 2006), hovering along the Sun-Earth line for space weather forecasting (Heiligers et al 2014;Vulpetti et al 2015), fly-bys of or hovering over asteroids for asteroid exploration and exploitation (McNutt et al 2014;Gong and Li 2014), exploring the Sun-Earth triangular Lagrange points for solar observations and potential Earth Trojans (Sood and Howell 2016) and parking the sail above or below the Earth's orbit for high-latitude navigation and communications (Waters and McInnes 2007) as well as far-reaching ideas such as planetary orbit modification (McInnes 2002). Adding solar sail propulsion to the classical Earth-Moon CR3BP will further demonstrate the potential of solar sailing and potentially open up novel space mission applications in the Earth-Moon system.…”