Experimental and Numerical Investigations on the Thrust Production Process of Magnetoplasma Sail

Review of Solar Magnetic Sailing Configurations for Space Travel

“…In a series of theoretical and experimental investigations on MagSail and its derivatives at JAXA and in collaboration with Japanese universities, Funaki et al [8][9][10][11][12] have lead research work in magnetic sails and propulsion systems that utilize magnetic field (revised M2P2 or magneto-plasmasail/MPS). The first laboratory experiment of MagSail was conducted to confirm theoretically derived thrust formula.…”

“…In addition to the spacecraft guidance method in a radial acceleration [31], electromagnet system should be studied in detail; until now, only rough estimations are conducted [9,32,33]. The principle of magneto-plasma sailing with magnetic field inflation by plasma injection developed by Funaki et al [8][9][10][11][12], Yamakawa et al [34], and Ashida et al [35], is shown in Fig. 4.…”

“…Following Funaki et al [10,12], the blocking area is estimated to be S = π L 2 , where L is the characteristic length, which is the distance between the stagnation point and the center of the coil, as depicted in Fig. 6.…”

“…7 which shows the variation of produced thrust as a function of the radius of the blocking area or characteristic length of the flow around MagSail. As elaborated in [9,10,12,43], L = 20 km is required to obtain~1 N, which will be suitable to accelerate a 1-ton-class deep space explorer. Thrust control is one of the critical issues in the use of MagSail for space travel.…”

“…Since there is no need to deploy large mechanical structures, one potential significant benefit of the M2P2 is its small hardware size. Research groups in Japan, among others those led by Funaki, have also carried out significant work in magnetic sail propulsion systems [8][9][10][11][12]. The design of the magnetic sail type space propulsion has steadily evolved over time, and the first magnetic sail spacecraft model has been created [13][14][15][16].…”