Collinear artificial equilibrium point maintenance with a wrinkled solar sail

Bianchi, Christian; Niccolai, Lorenzo; Mengali, Giovanni; Quarta, Alessandro A.

doi:10.1016/j.ast.2021.107150

Cited by 23 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 58 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…where a c is the spacecraft characteristic acceleration, that is, the acceleration magnitude induced by the solar sail when its nominal plane is perpendicular to the Sun-spacecraft line at a distance r = r ⊕ 1 au, and α ∈ [−90, 90] deg is the sail pitch angle measured counterclockwise from the Sun-spacecraft line; see Figure 5. The solar sail is here described through an augmented ideal force model [24,25] without degradation [26][27][28] or wrinkles [29]. In this context, the sail is assumed to maintain a flat surface, and the direction of the propulsive acceleration vector is normal to the sail nominal plane in the direction opposite to the Sun.…”

Section: Mission Optimizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trajectory Analysis and Optimization of Hesperides Mission

Mengali¹,

Quarta²

2022

Universe

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A challenging problem from a technological viewpoint is to send a spacecraft at a distance of about 600 au from the Sun, comparable with that of the Sun’s gravitational focus (that is, the general relativistic focusing of light rays, whose minimum solar distance is obtained when the light rays are assumed to graze the Sun’s surface), and reach it in a time interval on the order of a human working lifetime. A suitably oriented telescope at that distance would be theoretically able to observe exoplanets tens of light years far away and possibly to discover new life forms. The transfer trajectory of this mission is rather complex and requires a close selection of a suitable propulsion system, which must be able to provide the probe with the necessary energy to cruise at a velocity greater than 10 au/year. An effective outline of the these concepts is given by the Hesperides mission, originally proposed by Matloff in 2014. An interesting aspect of this mission proposal is the combination of a nuclear electric propulsion system and a classical solar sail that are jointly exploited to reach the necessary solar system escape velocity. However, the trajectory analysis reported by Matloff is very simplified and is essentially concentrated on a rough estimate of the time required by the spacecraft to reach a distance of 600au. Starting from the Hesperides baseline mission proposal, including the vehicle mass distribution, the aim of this work is to give a detailed mission analysis in an optimal framework. In particular, the spacecraft minimum time trajectory is calculated with indirect methods and a parametric analysis is made to highlight the impact of the main design parameters on the total flight time. The simulations show a substantial reduction of the mission time when compared with the original study.

show abstract

Section: Mission Optimizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trajectory Analysis and Optimization of Hesperides Mission

Mengali¹,

Quarta²

2022

Universe

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Therefore, this model is often referred to as "ideal" SRP acceleration model. Unlike other models that take into account the optical properties of the sail film material [1,[25][26][27] or more complex sail shapes [28][29][30][31], the ideal SRP acceleration model allows for a straightforward definition of the SRP acceleration, which becomes a function of the sailcraft attitude only and can be conveniently expressed in the sail-fixed reference frame O S as [1]: a SRP,S = νa c cos 2 α nS (8) where ν ∈ [0, 1] is the shadow factor and a c denotes the sailcraft characteristic acceleration defined as [1]:…”

Section: Solar Radiation Pressure Accelerationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…. , n * O ,NBH,16(30) which is then used to find the final interpolated normal direction, n * O , as:2 When performing the normalization, two of the three Cartesian components of the λ direction are considered instead of the spherical coordinates θ and φ to avoid dealing with discontinuous variables in the interpolation process.n *O =…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Locally optimal control laws for Earth-bound solar sailing with atmospheric drag

Carzana

Visser

Heiligers

2022

Aerospace Science and Technology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…In terms of attitude control, although there exists a variety of conventional attitude control methods such as reaction wheels, control moment gyroscopes (CMGs) and thrusters, these methods cannot effectively control the attitude of solar sails due to the mass limitation and the required long mission lifetime [1,3,11]. Currently, several methods for attitude control for solar sails exist [17], including the control vane method [18], gimbaled masses method [19,20], sliding masses method, shifted wings method, tilted wings method and billowed wings method for rigid solar sail and sail film with controllable reflectivity method for non-rigid solar sail [3,[21][22][23]. Qu et al also proposed a control method utilizing individually controllable elements to control each sail [24].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Simulation of a Flexible Bending Actuator for Solar Sail Attitude Control

et al. 2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents the design of a flexible bending actuator using shape memory alloy (SMA) and its integration in attitude control for solar sailing. The SMA actuator has advantages in its power-to-weight ratio and light weight. The bending mechanism and models of the actuator were designed and developed. A neural network based adaptive controller was implemented to control the non-linear nature of the SMA actuator. The actuator control modules were integrated into the solar sail attitude model with a quaternion PD controller that formed a cascade control. The feasibility and performance of the proposed actuator for attitude control were investigated and evaluated, showing that the actuator could generate 1.5 × 10−3 Nm torque which maneuvered a 1600 m2 CubeSat based solar sail by 45° in 14 h. The results demonstrate that the proposed SMA bending actuator can be effectively integrated in attitude control for solar sailing under moderate external disturbances using an appropriate controller design, indicating the potential of a lighter solar sail for future missions.

show abstract

Collinear artificial equilibrium point maintenance with a wrinkled solar sail

Cited by 23 publications

References 58 publications

Trajectory Analysis and Optimization of Hesperides Mission

Trajectory Analysis and Optimization of Hesperides Mission

Locally optimal control laws for Earth-bound solar sailing with atmospheric drag

Design and Simulation of a Flexible Bending Actuator for Solar Sail Attitude Control

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About