Abstract
IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun) is the world's first solar sail demonstration spacecraft. It was launched in May 2010 and has 14-m-square solar sail. Solar sail is a propulsion system which accelerates the spacecraft with the solar radiation pressure, and its performance is largely affected by its unevenness. In order to recover a shape of the sail in the space, pictures of IKAROS taken in the space with cameras separated from the main body are used because of its structural complexity. There are two types of image analysis method and in this paper shape from shading method, in which the brightness of pixels is focused on, is adopted. Since there are some causes of image degradation and they are difficult to model, some cases are verified to know the detail characteristics. This paper presents the approach for analyzing the pictures to obtain the shape of IKAROS sail, and compares the result with the one of another image analysis method and flight data of the attitude motion.
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