Exploring the Heliogyro’s Orbital Control Capabilities for Solar Sail Halo Orbits

Abstract

Solar sailing is an elegant form of space propulsion that reflects solar photons off a large membrane to produce thrust. Different sail configurations exist, including a traditional fixed polygonal flat sail and a heliogyro, which divides the membrane into a number of long, slender blades. The magnitude and direction of the resulting thrust depends on the sail’s attitude with respect to the sun (cone angle). At each cone angle, a fixed polygonal flat sail can only generate force constrained to a particular magnitude and direction, whereas the heliogyro can arbitrarily reduce the thrust magnitude through the additional control of pitching the blades. This gives the heliogyro more force control authority, which is exploited in this paper for orbital control of solar sail, sun–Earth, sub- halo orbits through a linear-quadratic regulator feedback controller. Two test cases are considered, quantifying either the maximum error in the injection state or the maximum delay in solar sail deployment due to deployment failure at injection from which the nominal orbit can still be recovered. This paper finds that the heliogyro can accommodate approximately an order of magnitude larger injection error than a fixed polygonal flat sail and a significantly larger sail deployment delay of up to 20.2 days in some cases.