The goal of any spacecraft is to deliver as much as payload as possible within a given time to agiven destination with minimum expenditure of propellant. This is done by minimizing the amount of mass needed for components in excess of the payload. Solar sails could potentially combat this problem, since the propulsion system consists only of an extremely lightweight thin film, rather than massive propellant and the associated tankage and apparatus. Recently, there has been a reemergence of interest in solar sails in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) community as they are becoming an increasingly viable option for fulfilling this goal. NASA's In-Space Propulsion Technology Program has identified solar sailing as one of its key propulsion technology priorities and has been leading the way to establish these technologies. Some of the nearer-term solar sail projects that are being proposed are the Solar Polar Imager (SPI), the L1 Diamond and the Particle Acceleration Solar Orbiter (PASO). The SPI mission objective is to measure the Suns magnetic field, polar irradiance, and coronal mass ejections. The L1 Diamond mission is a constellation of four spacecraft concurrently and cooperatively gathering data. The L1 constellation of spacecraft will hover on the Sun-ward side of the Earth-Sun L1 libration point. The objective of this mission is to measure the properties of solar-wind turbulence as a function of space and time. The PASO mission includes transferring a payload of scientific instruments to a very close solar orbit.
UltraSail - Ultra-Lightweight Solar Sail Concept
2005
18 pages
Report
Keine Angabe
Englisch
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