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NASA NTRSDate not supplied

ACS3: Flight Dynamics

The NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) mission consist of a spacecraft that will deploy an 80 m2 solar sail in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The main objective of the mission is to demonstrate that the solar wind can impulse the spacecraft to change the semimajor-axis and obtain a different orbit altitude. The sail will be composed of a combination of composite materials with distinct properties, and it will be deployed with lightweight booms from a 12U CubeSat bus, developed by Nanoavionics. The spacecraft will be launched aboard an Electron launch vehicle from Rocket LAB Launch Complex in New Zealand. This paper covers the orbital mechanics and navigation developments to support the mission, from the solar sail trajectory model to the actual flight dynamics system to provide the orbit determination analysis prior to flight. First, we introduce a description of our high-fidelity propagation that accounts for the solar radiation pressure to produce predictive ephemeris of the solar sail performance with several spacecraft attitude modes. As part of our results, we present plots of the expected altitudes achieved by the spacecraft once the solar sail is deployed under various assumptions of the solar weather. In addition to that, we present a full description of our orbit determination process which relies in GPS state vectors to accurately estimate the position and velocity uncertainties at a frequent cadence during the mission. The outcome of this process will be critical to achieving the objective of determining effective altitude change produced by the solar sail.

Solar sail↗

NASA NTRS2004

Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm (ANTS) Prospecting Asteroid Mission (PAM), Asteroid Proximity Operations

The Autonomous NanoTechnology Swarm (ANTS) is a generic mission architecture based on spatially distributed spacecraft, autonomous and redundant components, and hierarchical organization. The ANTS Prospecting Asteroid Mission (PAM) is an ANTS application which will nominally use a swarm of 1000 spacecraft. There would be 10 types of "specialists" with common spacecraft buses. There would be 10 subswarms of approximately 100 spacecraft each or approximately 10 of each specialist in each swarm. The ANTS PAM primary objective is the exploration of the asteroid belt in search of resources and material with astrobiologically relevant origins and signatures. The ANTS PAM spacecraft will nominally be released from a station in an Earth-Moon L1 libration point orbit, and they will use Solar sails for propulsion. The sail structure would be highly flexible, capable of changing morphology to change cross-section for capture of sunlight or to form effective "tip vanes" for attitude control. ANTS PAM sails would be capable of full to partial deployment, to change effective sail area and center of pressure, and thus allow attitude control. Results of analysis of a transfer trajectory from Earth to a sample target asteroid will be presented. ANTS PAM will require continuous coverage of different asteroid locations as close as one to two asteroid "diameters" from the surface of the asteroid for periods of science data collection during asteroid proximity operations. Hovering spacecraft could meet the science data collection objectives. The results of hovering analysis will be presented. There are locations for which hovering is not possible, for example on the illuminated side of the asteroid. For cases where hovering is not possible, the results of utilizing asteroid formations to orbit the asteroid and achieve the desired asteroid viewing will be presented for sample asteroids. The ability of ANTS PAM to reduce the area of the solar sail during asteroid proximity operations is critical to the maintenance of orbiting formations for a period of time. Results of analysis of potential "traffic" problems during asteroid proximity operations will be presented.

Marr, Greg↗

NASA NTRS2006

Recent Advances in Solar Sail Propulsion Systems at NASA

Supporting NASA's Science Mission Directorate, the In-Space Propulsion Technology Program is developing solar sail propulsion for use in robotic science and exploration of the solar system. Solar sail propulsion has the potential to provide longer on-station operation, increased scientific payload mass fraction, and access to previously inaccessible orbits for multiple potential science missions. Two different 20-meter solar sail systems were produced and successfully completed functional vacuum testing last year in NASA Glenn s Space Power Facility at Plum Brook Station Ohio. The sails were designed and developed by ATK Space Systems and L'Garde, respectively. The sail systems consist of a central structure with four deployable booms that support the sails. The sail designs are robust enough for deployments in a one atmosphere, one gravity environment and are scalable to much larger solar sails - perhaps as large as 150 meters on a side. In addition, computational modeling and analytical simulations have been performed to assess the scalability of the technology to the large sizes (150 meters) required to implement the first generation of missions using solar sails. Life and space environmental effects testing of sail and component materials are also nearly complete. This paper will summarize recent technology advancements in solar sails and their successful ambient and vacuum environment testing.

Johnson, Les↗

NASA NTRS2006

Recent Advances in Solar Sail Propulsion at NASA

Supporting NASA's Science Mission Directorate, the In-Space Propulsion Technology Program is developing solar sail propulsion for use in robotic science and exploration of the solar system. Solar sail propulsion will provide longer on-station operation, increased scientific payload mass fraction, and access to previously inaccessible orbits for multiple potential science missions. Two different 20-meter solar sail systems were produced and successfully completed functional vacuum testing last year in NASA Glenn's Space Power Facility at Plum Brook Station, Ohio. The sails were designed and developed by ATK Space Systems and L'Garde, respectively. These sail systems consist of a central structure with four deployable booms that support the sails. This sail designs are robust enough for deployments in a one atmosphere, one gravity environment, and are scalable to much larger solar sails-perhaps as much as 150 meters on a side. In addition, computation modeling and analytical simulations have been performed to assess the scalability of the technology to the large sizes (>150 meters) required for first generation solar sails missions. Life and space environmental effects testing of sail and component materials are also nearly complete. This paper will summarize recent technology advancements in solar sails and their successful ambient and vacuum testing.

Johnson, Les↗

NASA NTRS2010

Status of Solar Sail Technology Within NASA

In the early 2000s, NASA made substantial progress in the development of solar sail propulsion systems for use in robotic science and exploration of the solar system. Two different 20-m solar sail systems were produced and they successfully completed functional vacuum testing in NASA Glenn Research Center's (GRC's) Space Power Facility at Plum Brook Station, Ohio. The sails were designed and developed by ATK Space Systems and L Garde, respectively. The sail systems consist of a central structure with four deployable booms that support the sails. These sail designs are robust enough for deployment in a one-atmosphere, one-gravity environment and were scalable to much larger solar sails perhaps as large as 150 m on a side. Computation modeling and analytical simulations were also performed to assess the scalability of the technology to the large sizes required to implement the first generation of missions using solar sails. Life and space environmental effects testing of sail and component materials were also conducted. NASA terminated funding for solar sails and other advanced space propulsion technologies shortly after these ground demonstrations were completed. In order to capitalize on the $30M investment made in solar sail technology to that point, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) funded the NanoSail-D, a subscale solar sail system designed for possible small spacecraft applications. The NanoSail-D mission flew on board the ill-fated Falcon-1 Rocket launched August 2, 2008, and due to the failure of that rocket, never achieved orbit. The NanoSail-D flight spare will be flown in the Fall of 2010. This paper will summarize NASA's investment in solar sail technology to-date and discuss future opportunities

Johnson, Les↗

NASA NTRS2000

Propulsion Options For Interstellar Exploration

NASA is considering missions to explore near-interstellar space (40 - 250 Astronomical Units) early in the next decade as the first step toward a vigorous interstellar exploration program. A key enabling technology for such an ambitious science and exploration effort is a propulsion system capable of providing fast trip times, yet which has low enough mass to allow for the use of inexpensive launch vehicles. Advanced propulsion technologies that might support the First interstellar precursor mission by the end of the first decade of the new millennium include solar sails and nuclear electric propulsion. Solar sails and electric propulsion are two technology areas that may hold promise for the next generation of interstellar precursor missions as well - perhaps a thousand astronomical units traveled in a professional lifetime. Future missions to far beyond the Heliosphere will require the development of propulsion technologies that are only at the conceptual stage today. For years, the scientific community has been interested in solar sail and electric propulsion technologies to support robotic exploration of the solar system. Progress in thin-film materials fabrication and handling, and advancement in technologies that may enable the deployment of large sails in space are only now maturing to the point where ambitious interstellar precursor missions using sails can be considered. Xenon ion propulsion is now being demonstrated for planetary exploration by the Deep Space 1 mission. The primary issues for the adaptation of electric propulsion to interstellar precursor applications include the development of low specific mass nuclear power systems, engine lifetime, and high power operation. Recent studies of interstellar precursor mission scenarios that use these propulsion systems will be described, and the range of application of each technology will be explored.

Johnson, Les↗

NASA NTRS1989

Design of a Solar Sail Mission to Mars

A new area of interest in space vehicles is the solar sail. Various applications for which it has been considered are attitude control of satellites, focusing light on the jungles of Vietnam, and a Halley's comet rendezvous. Although for various reasons these projects were never completed, new interest in solar sails has arisen. The solar sail is an alternative to the rocket-propelled space vehicle as an interplanetary cargo vehicle, and manufacture of solar sails on the space station is a possibility. Solar sails have several advantages over rockets, including an unlimited power supply and low maintenance. The purpose of this project is to design a solar sail mission to Mars. The spacecraft will efficiently journey to Mars powered only by a solar sail. The vehicle weighs 487.16 kg and will be launchable on an expendable launch vehicle. The project includes an investigation of options to minimize cost, weight, and flight duration. The design of the sail and its deployment system are a major part of the project, as is the actual mission planning. Various topics researched include solar power, material, space environment, thermal control, trajectories, and orbit transfer. Various configurations are considered in order to determine the optimal structure. Another design consideration is the control system of the vehicle. This system includes the attitude control and the communication system of the sail. This project will aid in determining the feasibility of a solar sail and will raise public interest in space research.

Feaux, K.↗

NASA NTRS2005

Vacuum Deployment and Testing of a 4-Quadrant Scalable Inflatable Solar Sail System

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 1 AU solar sentinel mission. Featuring inflatably deployed sub-T(sub g), rigidized beam components, the 10,000 sq m sail and support structure weighs only 47.5 kg, including margin, yielding an areal density of 4.8 g/sq m. Striped sail architecture, net/membrane sail design, and 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 interim accomplishments of phase 3 of a 3-phase NASA program to advance the technology readiness level (TRL) of the solar sail system from 3 toward a technology readiness level of 6 in 2005. Under earlier phases of the program many test articles have been fabricated and tested successfully. Most notably an unprecedented 4-quadrant 10 m solar sail ground test article was fabricated, subjected to launch environment tests, and was successfully deployed under simulated space conditions at NASA Plum Brook s 30m vacuum facility. Phase 2 of the program has seen much development and testing of this design validating assumptions, mass estimates, and predicted mission scalability. Under Phase 3 a much larger 20 m square test article including subscale vane has been fabricated and tested. A 20 m system ambient deployment has been successfully conducted after enduring Delta-2 launch environment testing. The program will culminate in a vacuum deployment of a 20 m subscale test article at the NASA Glenn s Plum Brook 30 m vacuum test facility to bring the TRL level as close to 6 as possible in 1 g. This focused program will pave the way for a flight experiment of this highly efficient space propulsion technology.

Lichodziejewski, David↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

ACS3 - Flight Dynamics for A Solar Sail Technology Demonstration Mission

The NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) mission consist of a spacecraft that will deploy an 80 m 2 solar sail in a 1000 km sun-synchronous orbit. The main objective of the mission is to demonstrate that the solar wind can impulse the spacecraft to change the semimajor-axis and obtain a different orbit altitude. The sail will be composed of a combination of composite materials with distinct properties, and it will be deployed with lightweight booms from a 12U CubeSat bus, developed by Nanoavionics. The spacecraft will be launched aboard an Electron launch vehicle from Rocket LAB Launch Complex in New Zealand no earlier than July 2023. This paper covers the orbital mechanics and navigation developments to support the mission, from the solar sail trajectory model to the actual flight dynamics system to provide the orbit determination analysis prior to flight. First, we introduce a description of our high-fidelity propagation that accounts for the solar radiation pressure to produce predictive ephemeris of the solar sail performance with several spacecraft attitude modes. As part of our results, we present plots of the expected altitudes achieved by the spacecraft once the solar sail is deployed under various assumptions of the solar weather. In addition to that, we present a full description of our orbit determination process which relies in GPS state vectors to accurately estimate the position and velocity uncertainties at a frequent cadence during the mission. The outcome of this process will be critical to achieving the objective of determining effective altitude change produced by the solar sail.

Solar Sail↗

NASA NTRS2017

Steering Concept of a 2-Blade Heliogyro Solar Sail Spacecraft

Solar sails can be classified into two groups based on their method of stabilization: 1) truss supported, and 2) centrifugally (spin) supported. The truss configuration requires masts or booms to deploy, support, and rigidize the sails whereas the spin type uses the spacecraft’s centrifugal force to deploy and stabilize the sails. The truss-supported type sail has a scaling limitation because as the sail area gets larger, the sail is increasingly more difficult to make and stow: the masts and booms get heavier, occupying more volume, and have increased risk during deployment. This major disadvantage limits the size of the sail area. The spin type comes in two configurations: 1) spinning square/disk sail and 2) heliogyro sail. This spinning square/disk sail architecture suffers the same sail area limitation as the truss-supported sail.

Wiwattananon, Peerawan↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

“Are We There Yet?” Can We Biomap the Solar System with Low-Cost Solar Sail Missions?

Abstract: So much of our effort in space exploration has been devoted to one-off missions with major investments in each. This is a great strategy for early investigations of clearly significant planetary and small body destinations, but we have an entire Solar System to interrogate and the pace has definitely been slow to date. We are in the dawning era of much smaller spacecraft, and the potential to gather data from multiple destinations over longer time spans with a heightened cadence of missions to allow us to conduct survey-style investigations of the vast number of objects that attend our particular star. If we think of solar systems as belonging to one of two classes, i.e. life-bearing or not life-bearing, then the presence of some sort of biological or prebiological phenomenon on any individual body in a system places that system in the first category. The emergence of life can then be considered as a solar system-wide property and the entire suite of ingredients and processes that go into kindling of life anywhere within that system is of interest. This ranges from bodies with prebiotic chemistry through to full-blown biospheres. Thus, all bodies in a solar system are part of the milieu within which life occurs. Can the idea of low-cost solar sail-propelled spacecraft deployed en masse be useful for something as hard to investigate as life-like phenomena and their precursors? Perhaps, the answer is yes, and we must give serious attention to the possibilities.

Penelope J Boston↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Experimental Characterization of the Dimensional Stability of Deployable Composite Booms During Stowage

Thin-ply carbon fiber reinforced polymer materials offer the opportunity to create long thin-shell booms with high strength to weight ratios. These booms can be rolled up and stowed in small volumes to be later deployed. These features make them ideal for use in gossamer solar sails as well as other deployable space structures. It has been observed that stowing the booms in rolled-up configurations can cause time-dependent deformations. A comprehensive understanding of the detrimental effects of stowing the coiled booms is necessary to implement these structures in spaceflight missions. During stowage inside the spacecraft, the boom is subjected to a constant deformation/strain that causes it to relax over time, measurable by a decrease in stress. Using large deformation bending tests, the complete fold-stow-unfold-recover cycle of thin-laminate candidates for the rollable booms is characterized. Further bending and stowage testing is done at the boom level. The results from this test campaign will be used to evaluate the dimensional stability of deployable booms made from thin-ply composites that exhibit visco-elasto-plastic behavior and calibrate and validate numerical finite element models that include visco-elasto-plastic material models.

Experimental Characterization↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Solar Sail Spacecraft Development

During the spring semester, the author had the chance to support various activities in the structure dynamics branch including the testing of a solar sail and the development of deployable structures that are integrated into the solar sail membrane through 3D printing.

Danielle R DaCosta↗

NASA NTRS2019

The Kon-Tiki Mission – Demonstrating Large Solar Sails for Deep Space Missions

Two key NASA strategic documents, Our Dynamic Space Environment: Heliophysics Science and Technology Roadmap for 2014-2033 and 2013 Solar and Space Physics: Science for a Technological Society, contain over a dozen references describing the value of solar sails to enable revolutionary new observational capabilities. Based on these needs, the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) developed the Kon-Tiki mission concept to mature solar sail technology for use in future Heliophysics missions, as well as missions of interest across a broad user community (e.g., space weather and Earth polar observatories). Kon-Tiki would serve as a pathfinder for missions that observe the solar environment from unique vantage points such as the Solar Polar Imager (SPI), opening a fundamentally new range of observational capabilities for the Heliophysics Program and for space weather monitoring. Observations away from the Sun-Earth line (SEL) present unique opportunities for answering the outstanding science questions of Heliophysics, for improving space-weather monitoring and prediction, and for revealing new discoveries about our Sun and solar system. High solar inclinations are particularly compelling. Investment in, and demonstration of, the technology needed to enable polar missions is essential to making this unique vantage point a reality in the next decade. Propellantless solar sails can be used to create artificial equilibria and indefinite station-keeping at locations sunward of L1 along the SEL, or at any desired offset from the SEL leading or trailing the Earth in its orbit. They can change the heliocentric inclination of a spacecraft from the ecliptic to as high as solar polar, stopping and remaining at any intermediate inclination orbit in between. Sails can be used to hover over the Earth’s poles, using solar photon pressure to offset the Earth’s gravitational attraction, creating functional equivalents of geostationary earth orbits. The Kon-Tiki mission would fly a small spacecraft with a large (>1200 square meter) solar sail containing embedded reflectivity control devices (RCDs) and photovoltaic cells. The mission concept includes successful deployment of the solar sail, validation of all sail subsystems, controlled station-keeping inside of the Sun-Earth L1 point, attitude control of the sail with the RCDs (including spinning and despinning), demonstration of pointing performance for science imaging, and finally an increase in heliocentric inclination (out of the ecliptic).

Johnson, Les↗

NASA NTRS2004

Development of New Modeling and Analysis Tools for Solar Sails

Existing finite-element-based structural analysis codes are ineffective in treating deployable gossamer space systems, including solar sails that are formed by long space-deployable booms and extremely large thin-film membrane apertures. Recognizing this, the NASA Space transportation Technology Program has initiated and sponsored a focused research effort to develop new and computationally efficient structural modeling and analysis tools for solar sails. The technical approach of this ongoing effort will be described. Two solution methods, the Distributed Transfer Function Method and the Parameter-Variation-Principle method, based on which the technical approach was formatted are also discussed.

boom↗

NASA NTRS2005

In-Vacuum Photogrammetry of a 10-Meter Solar Sail

In July 2004, a 10-meter solar sail structure developed by L Garde, Inc. was tested in vacuum at the NASA Glenn 30-meter Plum Brook Space Power Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. The three main objections of the test were to demonstrate unattended deployment from a stowed configuration, to measure the deployed shape of the sail at both ambient and cryogenic room temperatures, and to measure the deployed structural dynamic characteristics (vibration modes). This paper summarizes the work conducted to fulfill the second test objective. The deployed shape was measured photogrammetrically in vacuum conditions with four 2-megapixel digital video cameras contained in custom made pressurized canisters. The canisters included high-intensity LED ring lights to illuminate a grid of retroreflective targets distributed on the solar sail. The test results closely matched pre-test photogrammetry numerical simulations and compare well with ABAQUS finite-element model predictions.

Meyer, Chris G.↗

NASA NTRS2021

The Solar Cruiser Mission

Selected by NASA as an ESPA-class rideshare technology demonstration mission to launch with the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission in 2025, the NASA MSFC Solar Cruiser mission will mature solar sail technology for use in future Heliophysics missions, as well as missions of interest across a broad user community including NOAA, Earth, and Planetary Sciences. Solar sails, which use reflected sunlight to derive thrust, can be used to create artificial equilibria and near-indefinite station-keeping at locations sunward of L1 along the Sun Earth Line (SEL), or at any desired offset from the SEL leading or trailing the Earth in its orbit. They can change the heliocentric inclination of a spacecraft from the ecliptic to as high as solar polar, stopping and remaining at any intermediate inclination orbit in between or can be used around a range of solar system bodies. The Solar Cruiser mission will fly a small spacecraft (~100 kg) with a large (>1600 square meter) solar sail containing embedded reflectivity control devices (RCDs) and photovoltaic cells, attaining a characteristic acceleration of >0.12 mm/s2. The mission concept includes successful deployment of the solar sail, validation of all sail subsystems, controlled station-keeping inside of the Sun-Earth L1 point, demonstration of pointing performance for science imaging, and finally an increase in heliocentric inclination (out of the ecliptic plane). Solar Cruiser would serve as a pathfinder for missions that observe the solar environment from unique vantage points such as a high inclination solar mission, opening a fundamentally new range of observational capabilities for the Heliophysics Program and for space weather monitoring. Observations away from the Sun-Earth line (SEL) present unique opportunities for answering the outstanding science questions of Heliophysics, for improving space-weather monitoring and prediction, and for revealing new discoveries about our Sun and solar system. High solar inclinations are particularly compelling. Investment in, and demonstration of, the technology needed to enable polar missions is essential to making this unique vantage point a reality in the next decade.

Solar Sail↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Navigation for the ACS3 Solar Sail Mission

NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) mission consists of a spacecraft that plans to be launched in early 2024. The spacecraft carries an 80 m2 solar sail that can produce effective thrust to alter the initial 1000 km sun-synchronous orbit. The main objective of the mission is to demonstrate the capabilities of the solar sail to effectively change various orbital parameters such as the semi-major axis and the inclination. Various composite materials were used to produce the sail, together with lightweight booms that will deploy from a 12U CubeSat bus. The astrodynamics team at NASA Ames Research Center has built a Flight Dynamics System (FDS) to provide mission navigation and to produce regular ephemeris once in orbit. The FDS can compute the trajectories that the spacecraft will perform once the sail is deployed. To achieve that, GPS data is obtained from the spacecraft telemetry and then is used with a Kalman filter and a smoother to obtain an orbit determination solution. The outcome of this process reduces the position and velocity uncertainty in a daily cadence. After that, the state vector output is used to feed a propagation model that includes the updated attitude and orbit of the spacecraft at that given moment. The trajectory model considers the updated attitude plan of the spacecraft as well as the environment conditions such as the solar weather to compute the associated drag and solar radiation pressure. This paper explains in detail the implementation of the FDS, as well as the solar sail solar radiation pressure trajectory model. We also present the results of several potential trajectory models under various assumptions of orbit parameters, attitude, environment, and material properties. In addition, we introduce a trajectory model for potential interplanetary use of an equivalent solar sail in the future. The outcome of this process will be critical to achieving the objective of determining effective altitude change produced by the solar sail.

Andres Dono Perez↗