Solar sails, which use optical pressure from the sun as propulsion, have great potential to be an inexpensive and sustainable way of exploring the universe. Recent advancements in the semiconductor industry have given rise to small and light actuators, sensors, and cameras, which make it possible to design high-performance, low-cost solar sails. For example, the Berkeley Low-cost Interplanetary Solar Sail (BLISS) is a sail design that takes advantage of lightweight electronics to enable a high sail area-to-mass ratio. Being low-cost and propellant-free, this design is well suited for rapid swarm exploration of near-Earth objects and long-duration missions. Since many solar sail missions are launched as secondary loads to a primary mission, rapid identification of feasible trajectories for changing schedules and mission parameters is needed. This paper develops a navigation strategy framework to address this need, designed to be lightweight and fast enough to run on a laptop. It consists of a general and customizable model for solar sail flight and a corresponding optimization framework integrating genetic algorithms with a coordinate descent method. This method is able to minimize flight time, control hover duration, manage closest sail approach to the Sun, and match approach velocities by specifying sail controls over time. Using BLISS as our solar sail design, we demonstrate this framework in three cases: sail-asteroid rendezvous, swarm network communication, and solar system escape. The goal is to allow researchers to utilize this framework to efficiently explore the design space to identify navigation strategies for their sail designs and missions.
Keywords:solar sails, dynamics, trajectory optimization
URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0045782525005195