Analysis of Displaced Solar Sail Orbits with Passive Control

Abstract

T HEuse of solar radiation pressure wasfirst proposed by a Soviet pioneer of astronautics, Tsiolkovski, and the technology was greatly developed by NASA for a proposed comet Halley rendezvous mission in the 1970s [1,2]. Recently, many space applications of solar sails are proposed because solar sails enable some special missions which would be impossible for any conventional space propulsion. Such missions include displaced solar orbits, geocentric halo orbits, Mercury sun-synchronous polar orbit, artificial Lagrange points, and so on. Leipold and Wagner investigated the Mercury sun-synchronous polar orbit using solar sail propulsion to explore the inner solar system [3]. West investigated the new artificial Lagrange points created by solar sails to provide early warning of solar plasma storms before they reach the Earth [4]. McInnes and Simmons have done much work on the dynamics and control of solar sails on different exotic trajectories [5,6]. The stability of solar sails on displaced solar orbitswith passive control is investigated in [7], and the results show that the sails are stable if the sail pitch angle is fixed with respect to a rotating frame. The passive stability can be realized by designing the configuration of the sail, which is investigated in [8]. Passive control is a good option for the solar sail because its large and complex structure may introduce some difficulties for active control. In this Note, the global stability of the solar sail with passive control is investigated by considering the dynamics in an inertial frame. It is found that the sail is stable with any initial values, and the sail will oscillate in the vicinity of a nominal orbit that is uniquely determined by the angular momentum of the sail. The amplitudes of the oscillations are determined by the initial values of the radius and angular velocity.