Affiliation:
1. Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering, University of Pisa, I-56122 Pisa, Italy
Abstract
An Electric Solar Wind Sail (E-sail) is a propellantless propulsion concept that extracts momentum from the high-speed solar wind stream to generate thrust. This paper investigates the performance of such a propulsion system in obtaining the transition from a prograde to a retrograde motion. The spacecraft is assumed to initially trace a circular heliocentric orbit of given radius. This particular trajectory, referred to as Circular Orbit Flip Trajectory (COFT), is analyzed in a two-dimensional mission scenario, by exploiting the capability of a medium-high performance E-sail to change the spacecraft angular momentum vector during its motion in the interplanetary space. More precisely, the paper describes a procedure to evaluate the E-sail optimal performance in a set of COFTs, by calculating their minimum flight times as a function of the sail reference propulsive acceleration. It is shown that a two-dimensional COFT can be generated by means of a simple steering law in which the E-sail nominal plane has a nearly fixed attitude with respect to an orbital reference system, for most of the time interval of the interplanetary transfer.
Subject
Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes,Computer Science Applications,Process Chemistry and Technology,General Engineering,Instrumentation,General Materials Science
Cited by
1 articles.
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