Abstract
Ideal solar sails are perfectly flat, rigid, and reflective, can hold arbitrary sun angles perfectly, etc. Real sails are very different. Yet much preliminary mission analysis is done with ideal sails, on the assumption that the only important effect of non-ideal behavior is slightly reduced performance. This assumption is often false. Real sails simply cannot fly some mission plans that look plausible for ideal sails, and in other cases, realistic mission design and realistic sailcraft design much consider some aspects of non-ideal sail behavior from the start.
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Acknowledgments
Most of the work described in this paper was done for, or in association with, the Microsatellite Design Project graduate course offered by Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. (The authors are its instructors.) Several years’ classes have asked questions, raised issues, or come across problems that inspired much of this work. The spacecraft preliminary designs shown in sections IV and V are largely the work of the students. Dr. Robert E. Zee, the director of SFL, has allowed us to mercilessly exploit his students while we educate them, and has encouraged us to present them with design problems that go well beyond SFL’s more normal projects. The authors are grateful for the helpful information and advice provided by Nathan Barnes and Billy Derbes of L’Garde, Inc., regarding their solar sail technology.
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Spencer, H., Carroll, K.A. (2014). Real Solar Sails are Not Ideal, and Yes It Matters. In: Macdonald, M. (eds) Advances in Solar Sailing. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34907-2_55
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34907-2_55
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