Abstract
Introduction S OLAR sails use the solar radiation pressure on a large reflecting surface to obtain low-thrust propulsion. This technology has been identified as enabling many recent space mission concepts. An interesting application involves the study of escape trajectories from the Earth. Early contributions to this subject date back to Sands1 and Fimple,2 who considered initial circular orbits and used other simplifying assumptions, and to Sackett and Edelbaum.3 Locally optimal steering laws for a flat sail have been considered in various forms by different authors.4−6 In a recent paper Coverstone and Prussing7 investigated the problem of Earth escape from a geosynchronous transfer orbit with an ideal flat sail through a sail-force control algorithm that maximizes the instantaneous rate of increase of the total orbital energy. In their analysis a spherical gravity model for the Earth is assumed, and only the solar gravitational perturbation is included.
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