The JAXA IKAROS Mission as a Technological Breakthrough

Abstract

What exactly constitutes a technological breakthrough? A breakthrough is an event that opens unexpected doors and expands horizons. Since JAXA’s IKAROS is the first solar-photon sail deployed in interplanetary space and has demonstrated the sail’s utility in both primary spacecraft propulsion and attitude control, it certainly constitutes a technological breakthrough. Moreover, it is certainly deserving of a chapter in this book! To capture some of the drama of this milestone mission, we consider various mission phases in chronological order. We remind the reader that IKAROS stands for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun.

Further Reading

Accomplishments and progress of IKAROS can be surveyed in many on-line sources including the JAXA website. Very interesting and relevant articles in the peer-reviewed literature are the following:

• (A) Y. Tsuda et al., Flight Status of IKAROS Deep Space Solar Sail Demonstrator, Acta Astronautica, 69, 833-840, 2011

• (B) Osamu Mori et al., Overview of IKAROS Mission, Advances in Solar Sailing, inaugural issue, Springer, 2014

In addition, for the more technical reader and the graduate student, we recommend the following set of papers on IKAROS written by its designers, who have analyzed data received from this sailcraft. In parentheses, the authors of this book added some their comments and/or pieces of information as received from Dr. Yuichi Tsuda (JAXA).

• 1. Special Issue on IKAROS, The Journal of Space Technology and Science by the Japanese Rocket Society, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2013 spring

• 2. Y. Tsuda, An Attitude Control Strategy for Spinning Solar Sail, 17th, IFAC Symposium on Automatic Control in Aerospace, WE-P02, 2007 June 25-29, Toulouse, France. (This is the first paper showing the specific concept of Reflectance Control Device—RCD—for controlling a sailcraft in attitude. This can be considered the first reliable design concept after James Wright, who suggested the utilization of variable reflectance for space sailing in his book of 1992. The RCD has been implemented onboard IKAROS.)

• 3. Y. Mimasu, T. Yamaguchi, M. Matsumoto, M. Nakamiya, R. Funase, and J. Kawaguchi, Spinning solar sail orbit steering via spin rate control, Advances in Space Research, Vol. 48, December, 2011, pp. 1810-1821 (This paper explains how controlling the orbit of a spinning sail via the attitude perturbations induced by the solar radiation pressure.)

• 4. Y. Tsuda, T. Saiki, R. Funase, Y. Mimasu, Generalized Attitude Model for Spinning Solar Sail Spacecraft, AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics, Vol. 36, No. 4, 2013, pp. 967-974, doi: 10.2514/1.59516 (Unique attitude behavior discovered during IKAROS operations.)

• 5. Y. Tsuda, O. Mori, R. Funase, H. Sawada, T. Yamamoto, T. Saiki, T. Endo, K. Yonekura, H. Hoshino, J. Kawaguchi, Achievement of IKAROS Japanese Deep Space Solar Sail Demonstration Mission, Acta Astronautica, Vol. 82, No. 2, 2013, doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2012.03.032 (This is the report of achievements after the nominal operational phase of the IKAROS mission was completed.)

• 6. M. Miyauchi, R. Yokota, Development of heat sealable polyimide thin films with high space environmental stabilities for solar sail IKAROS membrane, Protection of Materials and Structures from the Space Environment, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 32, 303-316, 2012 (asymmetric thermoplastic material suitable for solar-sail petals)

• 7. R. Yokota, M. Miyauchi, Y. Ishida, Novel Asymmetric Aromatic Polyimide Having Excellent Space Environmental Stability and Application for Solar Sail IKAROS Membrane, Int. J. Soc. Mater. Eng. Resour., Vol. 20, No. 1, April 2014 (development of new polyimide chemical structures that meet some basic requirements of sail membrane working in Space)