The L1 diamond affair

Abstract

The L1 Diamond is a configuration of four solar sail spacecraft traveling in approximately a diamond arrangement and situated on the Sun side of the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point. The purpose of this diamond arrangement will be to determine the large scale three-dimensional structure of solar disturbances propagated toward the Earth. These spacecraft will have a wide separation of 100 to 500 Earth radii and solar sails will maintain this separation in non-Keplarian orbits. In this paper equations are derived to calculate the solar sail characteristic acceleration as a function of the position in the L1 Diamond formation.