Solar sailing in realistic mode, based on a locally-optimal control laws

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Solar sailing in realistic mode, based on a locally-optimal control laws

Chernyakina, Irina V.

Abstract Ballistic design of solar sailing missions in the solar system is composed of defining the design parameters, the control programs, and the trajectories that provide performance goals of a flight. The use of a solar sail spacecraft imposes specific restrictions on mission parameters that include the degradation limit on the flight duration, the maximum temperature of solar sail's surface, the minimum distance from the Sun, the maximum angular velocity of the spacecraft's rotation and others. Many authors considered the impact of these restrictions on the design of the mission separately, but they used a sophisticated method of finding the exact optimal motion control or applied the most straightforward laws of motion control. This paper uses local-optimal control laws at the complete mathematical models of motion and functioning of solar sail spacecraft to describe a technique of designing interplanetary missions. The described method avoids the need to obtain an accurate optimal solution to the control problem and does not cause significant computational difficulties.