Fabrication and Deployment Testing of 20-Meter Solar Sail Quadrants for a Scaleable Square Solar Sail Ground Test System

Abstract

2 . These areal densities are low enough to allow nearly all of the Solar Sail missions that have been proposed by the scientific community and the fundamental technology required to produce these sails has been demonstrated on the ground test sails that have recently been built. These demonstrations have shown that the technology is maturing enough to enable solar sails to be built to support critical science missions. Solar Sails will support NASA's Vision for Space Exploration by allowing communication satellite orbits that can maintain continuous communication with the polar regions of the Moon and Mars and to support solar weather monitoring to provide early warning of solar flares and storms that could threaten the safety of astronauts and other spacecraft.