Electric sail control mode for amplified transverse thrust

Abstract

The electric solar wind sail produces thrust by centrifugally spanned high voltage tethers interacting with the solar wind protons. The sail attitude can be controlled and attitude maneuvers are possible by tether voltage modulation synchronous with the sail rotation. Especially, the sail can be inclined with respect to the solar wind direction to obtain transverse thrust to change the osculating orbit angular momentum. Such an inclination has to be maintained by a continual control voltage modulation. Consequently, the tether voltage available for the thrust is less than the maximum voltage provided by the power system. Using a spherical pendulum as a model for a single rotating tether, we derive analytical estimations for the control efficiency for two separate sail control modes. One is a continuous control modulation that corresponds to strictly planar tether tip motion. The other is an on–off modulation with the tether tip moving along a closed loop on a saddle surface. The novel on–off mode is introduced here to both amplify the transverse thrust and reduce the power consumption. During the rotation cycle, the maximum voltage is applied to the tether only over two thrusting arcs when most of the transverse thrust is produced. In addition to the transverse thrust, we obtain the thrusting angle and electric power consumption for the two control modes. It is concluded that while the thrusting angle is about half of the sail inclination for the continuous modulation it approximately equals to the inclination angle for the on–off modulation. The efficiency of the on–off mode is emphasized when power consumption is considered, and the on–off mode can be used to improve the propulsive acceleration through the reduced power system mass.