Vacuum Deployment And Testing Of a 4-Quadrant Scalable Inflatable Rigidizable Solar Sail System

Technology Requirements of Exploration Beyond Neptune by Solar Sail Propulsion

“…The use of a square sail is important to consider as this sail architecture has formed the focus of much of the recent solar sail hardware development by both ESA [38][39][40] and NASA [41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. It is noted that the hybrid solar sail/SEP IKAROS project is based on a spinning, square sail architecture [48] and could be a critical stepping stone towards the development of future pure solar sail…”

Ground Testing a 20-Meter Inflation Deployed Solar Sail

“…The beams were rigidized following deployment using a sub-T g rigidizable material in the matrix [6][7][8][9][10] . The material rigidization scheme takes advantage of the cold temperatures of space for increasing modulus of the beam material.…”

Curved pleat folding for smooth wrapping

“…Possible metrics of size include the maximum linear dimension, and the combined linear measurement, which is the sum of the object's dimensions in three orthogonal directions. Much work has been done on similar or related problems including, for example, solar-sailing deployment experiments by Salama et al [2] and Lichodziejewski et al [3]. In this paper, we focus on the problem of packaging sheets with non-zero thickness and leverage the mechanics of curved crease folding to provide a solution.…”