Flexible Solar Array of Small Solar Power Sail Demonstrator “IKAROS”

Accessing the Solar System With a Small Solar Sail

Solar sailing is a proposed means of space propulsion in which a reflective surface collects momentum from solar photons to accelerate a vehicle. The current trend within the solar sailing community is to increase sail size as solar sailing technologies advance, allowing for larger payloads and higher accelerations. However, with the miniaturization of modern payloads, sail sizes can be dramati...

Flexible Models for Solar Sail Control

Solar sails employ a unique form of propulsion, gaining momentum from incident and reflected photons. However, the momentum transferred by an individual photon is extremely small. Consequently, a solar sail must have an extremely large surface area and also be extremely light. The flexibility of the sail then must be considered when designing or evaluating control laws. In this paper, solar sai...

Lightweight Flexible Solar Array Validation Report

Solar Polar Orbiter: A Solar Sail Technology Reference Study

An assessment is presented of a Solar Polar Orbiter mission as a Technology Reference Study. The goal is to focus the development of strategically important technologies of potential relevance to future science missions. The technology is solar sailing, and so the use of solar sail propulsion is, thus, defined a priori. The primary mission architecture utilizes maximum Soyuz Fregat 2-1b launch ...

Small Hybrid Solar Power System

This paper introduces a novel concept of mini-hybrid solar power plant integrating a field of solar concentrators, two superposed Organic Rankine -CyclesIORC) and a (bio)Diesel engine. Turbines for the Organic Rankine Cycles are hermetic scroll expandergenerators. Sun tracking solar collectors are composed of rows of flat mirroi bands (CEP) arranged in a plane, which focus the solar energy onto...