Abstract Understanding the solar corona and its structure, evolution and composition can provide new insights regarding the processes that control the transport of energy throughout the solar atmosphere and out into the heliosphere. However, the visible emission coming from the corona is more than a million times weaker than the emission from the photosphere, implying that direct corona observations are only possible when the disk of the Sun is fully obscured. In this paper we perform a feasibility study of a Sun occultation mission using the Earth as a natural occulter. The challenge is that the occultation zone created by the Earth does not follow a Keplerian trajectory, causing satellites placed in this region to quickly drift away from eclipse conditions. To increase the number of revisits while optimizing the propellant budget, we propose optimal trajectories in the Sun–Earth-Spacecraft circular restricted three body problem that account for scientific and engineering constraints such as limited power budget and mission duration. Chemical propulsion, electric propulsion and solar sailing configurations are compared in terms of performance and mission feasibility, revealing how 24 h of corona observations would be possible every 39 days with as little as 199 m/s of . The feasibility of the solar sail approach is hereby demonstrated, making it a challenging engineering alternative to currently available technologies.
Highlights Understanding the solar corona can provide new insights regarding its structure and composition. Using natural bodies as occulters enables longer and more frequent observations than the ones on Earth. Optimal trajectories are adopted to bring the satellite back in the occultation zone. A new homotopy procedure from time optimal with electric propulsion to time optimal with solar sail is presented. A trade-off analysis is performed taking into account different mission constraints
Trajectory design of Earth-enabled Sun occultation missions
Acta Astronautica ; 195 ; 251-264
2022-02-25
14 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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