Controlled flight of a solar sail-propelled spacecraft ('sailcraft') is a six-degree-of-freedom dynamics problem. Current state-of-the-art tools that simulate and optimize the trajectories flown by sailcraft do not treat the full kinetic (i.e. force and torque-constrained) motion, instead treating a discrete history of commanded sail attitudes, and either neglecting the sail attitude motion over an integration timestep, or treating the attitude evolution kinematically with a spline or similar treatment. The present paper discusses an aspect of developing a next generation sailcraf trajectory designing optimization tool JPL, for NASA's Solar Sail Spaceflight Simulation Software (SS). The aspect discussed in an experimental approach to modeling full six-degree-of-freedom kinetic motion of a solar sail in a trajectory propagator. Early results from implementing this approach in a new trajectory propagation tool are given.


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    Title :

    A practical six-degree of freedom solar sail dynamics model for optimizing solar sail trajectories with torque constraints


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    AIAA Guidance, Navigation and Control Conference ; 2004 ; Providence, RI, United States


    Publication date :

    2004-08-16


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English