Note: This post is adapted from a conference paper of mine presented at the Astrodynamics Specialists Conference in Summer 2021. You can read the full paper here.
Abstract – Design of Solar Sailing Trajectories Resilient to Safe Mode Events
Solar sails are an enabling technology for stand-alone small-satellite deep-space exploration. However, their always-on nature, combined with the time of flight required for deep-space missions, makes them particularly susceptible to safe mode events. Unlike missions using electric propulsion, exclusively solar sailing missions cannot carry extra propellant to make up for a safe mode event, and more powerful methods like expected availability cannot be directly applied. This work extends the expected availability and duty cycle approaches to solar sailing. Through an application to NASA’s Solar Cruiser mission, a 46 % increase in trajectory resilience is obtained at negligible change in the mission’s time of flight. Additionally, it is shown that when a safe mode event stops the spacecraft from reaching its target orbit, the developed methods reduce the expected final error by approximately an order of magnitude.
Key Takeaways
The full paper is online here, but here are, in my opinion, the most interesting aspects
- Solar sails, as an always-on propulsion method are extremely susceptible to missed thrust events **ref MTEs**
- We can increase solar sail trajectories resiliency to missed thrust events from 61% to 89% using expected angle fraction!
- Expected angle fraction also produces a computationally efficient method for implementing duty cycles
Presentation
Due to COVID-19, this conference was held virtually, and I have uploaded a video of my presentation below.
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