Abstract
The idea of exploiting solar radiation pressure for space travel, or solar sailing, is more than a 100 years old, and yet most of the research thus far has considered only a limited number of sail configurations. However solar sails do not have to be inertially-pointing squares, spin-stabilised discs or heliogyros: there is a range of different configurations and concepts that present some advantageous features. This chapter will show and discuss three non-conventional solar sail configurations and their applications. In the first, the sail is complemented by an electric thruster, resulting in a hybrid-propulsion spacecraft which is capable to hover above the Earth’s Poles in a stationary position (pole-sitter). The second concept makes use of a variable-geometry pyramidal sail, naturally pointing towards the sun, to increase or decrease the orbit altitude without the need of propellant or attitude manoeuvres. Finally, the third concept shows that the orbit altitude can also be changed, without active manoeuvres or geometry change, if the sail naturally oscillates synchronously with the orbital motion. The main motivation behind these novel configurations is to overcome some of the engineering limitations of solar sailing; the resulting concepts pose some intriguing orbital and attitude dynamics problems, which will be discussed.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter summarises some of the work done in collaboration with many people, to whom the author is extremely thankful: Colin McInnes and Jeannette Heiligers for the hybrid propulsion (this research was funded by the European Research Council, as part of project 227571 VISIONSPACE); Patrick Harkness and Malcolm McRobb for the oscillating sail; Patrick Harkness, Leonard Felicetti and Malcolm McRobb for the quasi-rhombic pyramid.
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Ceriotti, M. (2016). Unconventional Solar Sailing. In: Gómez, G., Masdemont, J. (eds) Astrodynamics Network AstroNet-II. Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, vol 44. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23986-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23986-6_4
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