Look-ahead flight path control for solar sail spacecraft

Abstract

Recent investigations of trajectory options that incorporate solar sails have been motivated by missions to observe planetary poles or to communicate with an outpost at the lunar south pole. Designing reference trajectories and understanding their fundamental dynamics are the necessary first steps toward flying spacecraft in dynamically complicated regimes. However, the existence of a reference orbit alone is insufficient for flight operations. Two variations of a turn-and-hold strategy are examined for flight-path control: an approach that implements multiple turns to achieve a target in an error-free scenario and an approach that incorporates a look-ahead strategy to accommodate representative errors.