Station keeping of a solar sail around a Halo orbit

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Station keeping of a solar sail around a Halo orbit

Farrés, Ariadna / Jorba, Àngel

Abstract Solar sails are a concept of spacecraft propulsion that takes advantage of solar radiation pressure to propel a spacecraft. Although the thrust provided by a solar sail is small it is constant and unlimited. This offers the chance to deal with novel mission concept. In this work we want to discuss the controllability of a spacecraft around a Halo orbit by means of a solar sail. We will describe the natural dynamics for a solar sail around a Halo orbit. By natural dynamics we mean the behaviour of the trajectory of a solar sail when no control on the sail orientation is applied. We will then discuss how a sequence of changes on the sail orientation will affects the sail's trajectory, and we will use this information to derive efficient station keeping strategies. Finally we will check the robustness of these strategies including different sources of errors in our simulations.

Highlights ► We describe the dynamics of a solar sail around a Halo-orbit. ► We derive a station keeping strategy for solar sails around Halo orbit. ► The strategy takes into account the dynamics of the system around the periodic orbit. ► We test the robustness of this strategy for different sources of error.