Engineering Journal: Science and InnovationELECTRONIC SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING PUBLICATION
Certificate of Registration Media number Эл #ФС77-53688 of 17 April 2013. ISSN 2308-6033. DOI 10.18698/2308-6033
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Article

On motion of a spacecraft with the constantly oriented solar sail

Published: 08.09.2025

Authors: Vaskova V.S., Rodnikov A.V.

Published in issue: #9(165)/2025

DOI: 10.18698/2308-6033-2025-9-2471

Category: Mechanics | Chapter: Theoretical Mchanics, Machine Dynamics

The paper considers a non-volatile method of moving a light spacecraft along a tether connecting heavy space stations around a single heliocentric orbit. Relative motion in this case occurs due to using a solar sail installed on the spacecraft that partially reflects solar radiation. The tether is assumed to be absolutely flexible, weightless, inextensible and implementing a geometric one-way constraint that limits the spacecraft motion in the orbital plane to a certain ellipse with a foci at the stations. The flight is performed between two arbitrary points of this ellipse with zero initial and final relative velocities and with the sail constantly oriented so that the solar radiation force vector is perpendicular to the line passing through the given points. The paper establishes that such a flight is an element of the pendulum oscillation, provided the tether is taut. The theorem on alteration in the kinetic energy is applied to determine analytically the spacecraft relative velocity and the tether tension force at each point of the trajectory; motion duration is numerically found. The paper describes the software implementing search for the corresponding quantities. It shows that a flight over a distance of 2 km takes several hours; and the tether tension is less than 2 gauss.

EDN  QBGSDM


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