Solar sails reflect photons streaming from the sun and transfer momentum to the sail. The thrust, though small, is continuous and acts for the life of the mission without the need for propellant. Recent advances in materials and ultra-low mass gossamer structures have enabled a host of useful missions utilizing solar sail propulsion. The team of L'Garde, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Ball Aerospace, and Langley Research Center, under the direction of the NASA In-Space Propulsion office, has been developing a scalable solar sail configuration to address NASA's future space propulsion needs. The baseline design currently in development and testing was optimized around the 1AU solar sentinel mission. Featuring inflatably deployed and Sub Tg rigidized beam components, the 10,000 m(sup 2) sail and support structure weighs only 47.5 kg., including margin, yielding an areal density of 4.8 g/m(sup 2). Striped sail architecture, coupled with L'Garde's conical boom deployment technique allows scalability without high mass penalties. This same structural concept can be scaled to meet and exceed the requirements of a number of other useful NASA missions. This paper discusses the solar sad design and outlines the interim accomplishments to advance the technology readiness level (TRL) of the subsystem from 3 toward a technology readiness level of 6 in 2005. Under Phase I1 of the program many component test articles have been fabricated and tested successfully. Most notably an unprecedented section of the conically deployed rigidizable sail support beam, the heart of the inflatable rigidizable structure, has been deployed and tested in the NASA Goddard thermal vacuum chamber with good results. The development testing validated the beam packaging and deployment. The inflatable conically deployed, Sub Tg rigidizable beam technology is now in the TRL 5-6 range. The fabricated masses and structural test results of our beam components have met predictions and no changes to the mass estimates or design assumptions have been identified adding great credibility to the design. Several quadrants of the Mylar sail have also been fabricated and successfully deployed validating our design, manufacturing, and deployment techniques.
Development and Ground Testing of a Compactly Stowed Scalable Inflatably Deployed Solar Sail
2004
20 pages
Report
No indication
English
AIAA-2004-1507 Development and Ground Testing of a Compactly Stowed Inflatably Deployed Solar Sail
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