In this paper, we have attempted to begin the process of providing more detailed review of the Solar Photon Thruster concept originally proposed by Dr. Robert L. Forward in 1991. The paper focused on detailing the technical performance advantages (additional thrust at along axes tangent and aligned with the sun-sail vector, higher optimal sail coning angle), reviewing how this increased performance could be traded (relative to traditional flat sail architectures) to enable sails with larger areal density, higher payload masses, and or significantly smaller collecting area. Performance advantage was shown to be quite strong, either in terms of increased mission performance, or enabling larger sail areal densities (thereby enabling earlier technology insertion) for a given sail size and mission performance, significantly larger Payload masses for a given sail size and mission performance, and/or significant reductions in required sail collector size. This was followed by more detailed but still high level reviews of the aspects of the design of individual components that would make up a SPT. All these results were then combined to form estimates of achievable areal density trends versus fundamental sail size. While there remains a large amount of more detailed analysis to perform, based on these initial examinations, the Solar Photon Thruster Concept appears to still have many favorable characteristics, and offer significant performance and or programmatic advantages over more traditional flat sail architectures, particularly for the more demanding missions that involve orbital cranking and moving out of the ecliptic plane


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    Title :

    Robert L. Forward's solar photon thruster solar sail architecture revisited


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2004


    Size :

    13 Seiten, 10 Quellen


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English






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