HR: 0830h
AN: SH21B-0125    [PDF]
TI: NASA's Integrated Development of Solar Sail Propulsion
AU: * Garbe, G P
EM: Gregory.P.Garbe@nasa.gov
AF: NASA/Marshall Space Flight NASA/Marshall SFC, In Space Propulsion TD 05, Huntsville, AL 35812
AU: Montgomery, E E
EM: Sandy.Montgomery@nasa.gov
AF: NASA/Marshall Space Flight NASA/Marshall SFC, In Space Propulsion TD 05, Huntsville, AL 35812
AU: Van Sant, J T
EM: John.T.VanSant@nasa.gov
AF: NASA/Goddard SFC, Sun Earth Connections Program Code 460, Greenbelt, MD 20771
AU: Campbell, B A
EM: Bruce.Campbell@nasa.gov
AF: NASA/Goddard SFC, Sun Earth Connections Program Code 460, Greenbelt, MD 20771
AB: Solar sails have been studied for a variety of missions and have the potential to provide cost effective, propellantless propulsion that enables longer on-station operation, increased scientific payload mass fraction, and access to previously inaccessible orbits (e. g., non-Keplerian, high solar latitudes, etc.). Research being conducted by the In-Space Propulsion (ISP) Technologies Projects is at the forefront of NASA's efforts to mature propulsion technologies that will enable or enhance a variety of space science missions. Solar sail propulsion systems will be required to meet the challenge of monitoring and predicting space weather by the Office of Space Science's (OSS) Living with a Star (LWS) program. Near-to-mid-term mission needs include monitoring of solar activity and observations at high solar latitudes. Work currently funded by the ISP's Solar Sail Propulsion (SSP) project is centered around the quantitative demonstration of scalability of present solar sail subsystem designs and concepts to future mission requirements through ground testing of hardware, computational modeling and analytical simulations. This talk will give an overview SSP's flagship development tasks, how this work will lead to a flight validation and will scale to the size needed for the Solar Polar Imager and L1-Diamond SEC roadmap missions
DE: 7594 Instruments and techniques
DE: 7599 General or miscellaneous
SC: SPA - Solar and Heliospheric Physics [SH]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting