Deployment Control Experiment of Solar Sail in Sub-Payload of M-V Rocket
- Paper number
IAC-05-C2.1.B.08
- Author
Dr. Shinsuke Takeuchi, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)/ISAS, Japan
- Coauthor
Dr. Yuichi Tsuda, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Japan
- Coauthor
Dr. Junichiro Kawaguchi, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)/ISAS, Japan
- Year
2005
- Abstract
A solar sail is one of propulsion systems for near future interplanetary mission, which uses solar pressure for thrust by reflecting sunlight with very large membrane. We investigate the solar sail as a candidate of engineering test satellite. In order to verify the solar sail design, a deployment experiment is needed, but it is difficult to perform an experiment of large membrane on the ground because of its lower stiffness. To solve this problem, we plan to use a sounding rocket. In this paper we describe our study and plan. Last summer we ISAS launched S-310-34 sounding rocket and deployed about a 10m diameter sail. In this experiment we started the deployment and left it in natural opening motion by use of the centrifugal force. However it will cause many trouble such as disturbance or vibration for the actual satellite to deploy the sail at one motion without any control like the experiment of the sounding rocket. We think it is effective in order to avoid this problem to control the deployment and deploy the sail in quasi-static process. Then we developed a mechanism to control the deployment of the sail and we examine some experiments to deploy a 2m diameter sail on the ground. As a next stage we plan to carry out a deployment experiment of a larger scale sail and for this purpose we will use a sub-payload of the M-V satellite launcher. This sub-payload is mount on the third stage of M-V and the experiment is carried out after the separation of the main satellite in the low earth orbit. The M-V will be launched at next winter and this paper investigates the results of the ground test until now and the details of the plan of this experiment.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-05-C2.1.B.08.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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