NASA's Integrated Development of Solar Sail Propulsion Project
Solar sails have been studied for a variety of missions and have the potential to provide cost effective, propellantless propulsion that enables longer on-station operation, increased scientific payload mass fraction, and access to previously inaccessible orbits (e. g., non-Keplerian, high solar latitudes, etc.). Research being conducted by the In-Space Propulsion (ISP) Technologies Projects is at the forefront of NASA's efforts to mature propulsion technologies that will enable or enhance a variety of space science missions. Solar sail propulsion systems will be required to meet the challenge of monitoring and predicting space weather by the Office of Space Science's (OSS) Living with a Star (LWS) program. Near-to-mid-term mission needs include monitoring of solar activity and observations at high solar latitudes. Work currently funded by the ISP s Solar Sail Propulsion (SSP) project is based on the quantitative demonstration of scalability of present solar sail subsystem designs and concepts to future mission requirements through ground testing of hardware, computational modeling and analytical simulations. This paper will give an overview of the Solar Sail Propulsion project's major development tasks of fabricating and testing two different subscale (400 square meter sail) solar sail system architectures. It will then be shown how either of these subscale prototypes can evolve into a flight validation system and briefly discuss the mission parameter. The paper will conclude with a discussion on how a flight validation will exercise the quantitative tools needed to demonstrate the scale to the size needed for the Solar Polar Imager and L1-Diamond SEC roadmap missions.