The CanX-4&amp;5 Intersatellite Link (ISL): An Enabling Satellite-to-Satellite Transceiver Design for Intra-Constellation Communications

Bonin, Grant

doi:10.2514/6.2013-5627

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…A 4 m 2 square drag sail was also equipped on the Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment-7 (CanX-7) satellite, a 3U CubeSat designed by the University of Toronto. The drag sail had a thickness of 0.0127 mm and was made of Upilex-S (a Kapton-like material) and coated with aluminum to protect the substrate from atomic oxygen erosion [43]. CanX-7 was launched to a Sun-synchronous orbit with an altitude of 700 km in September 2016.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performance Estimate of a Spin-Stabilized Drag Sail for Spacecraft Deorbiting

Niccolai,

Mengali

2024

Applied Sciences

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The growing amount of space debris in geocentricorbit poses a significant threat to the future of space operations. To mitigate this problem, current international guidelines state that a satellite should be able to deorbit or insert into a graveyard orbit within 25 years from the end of its operational life. In this context, drag-enhancing devices such as drag sails are currently an active field of research and development because of their ability to make a spacecraft decay from low Earth orbit without the need for any on-board propellant. Drag sails, conceptually similar to solar sails, are thin membranes deployed by a spacecraft at the end of its operational life to increase the area-to-mass ratio and, consequently, atmospheric drag. To be effectively exploited, a drag sail should maximize the surface area exposed to atmospheric particle flow. However, this would require a fully functional three-axis stabilization system, which may either be unavailable or non-functional on an orbiting satellite after years of space operations. To simplify the deorbiting phase, in this paper we propose to use a spin-deployed and spin-stabilized drag sail, which represents a reasonable compromise between simplicity of implementation and deorbiting performance in terms of total decay time. In fact, a spinning drag sail could take advantage of centrifugal force to unfold and of gyroscopic stiffness to maintain an inertially fixed axis of rotation. Numerical simulations accounting for the main perturbation effects quantify the effectiveness of the proposed device compared with an optimal configuration (i.e., a three-axis stabilized drag sail) and a tumbling drag sail.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%