The Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System (HERTS) - Design, Trades, and Analyses Performed in a Two Year NASA Investigation of Electric Sail Propulsion Systems

Abstract

I. IntroductionP ersonnel from NASA's MSFC have been investigating the feasibility of an advanced propulsion system known as the Electric Sail (E-Sail) for future scientific exploration missions. This team initially won a NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) Phase I NASA Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) award and then a two-year follow-on Phase II NIAC award in October 2015. This paper documents the findings from this three-year investigation.An Electric sail, a propellant-less propulsion system, uses solar wind ions to rapidly travel either to deep space or the inner solar system. Scientific spacecraft could reach Pluto in ~5 years, or the boundary of the solar system in ten to twelve years compared to the thirty-five plus years the Voyager spacecraft took.The team's recent focuses have been:1) Developing a Particle in Cell (PIC) numeric engineering model from MSFC's experimental data on the interaction between simulated solar wind and a charged bare wire that can be applied to a variety of missions, 2) Determining what missions could benefit from this revolutionary propulsion system, 3) Conceptualizing spacecraft designs for various tasks: to reach the solar system's edge, to orbit the sun as Heliophysics sentinels, or to examine a multitude of asteroids.

Electric Sail Test Cube–Lunar Nanospacecraft, ESTCube-LuNa: Solar Wind Propulsion Demonstration Mission Concept

“…There are several related and notable propellantless propulsion developments globally and which are important in the context of the Special Issue "Advances in CubeSat Sails and Tethers", where the current article belongs. In the United States, the most prominent E-sail development has been the twophase NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) "Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System", or HERTS project, which prepared a particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation and analysed the potential E-sail missions, scenarios and spacecraft designs [15,16]. In Australia, the ionospheric plasma drag on objects in LEO has been analysed with PIC simulations and experiments [17].…”