Abstract
To combine solar gravity and solar radiation pressure efficiently. This chapter is devoted to study the way a sailcraft can achieve so high a cruise speed that the related mission types may allow the exploration of the heliosphere and well beyond in a time interval shorter than the mean human job time, including the design phase. Four main sections and various subsections are devoted to such an aim. Some concepts discussed in Chap. 5 are extended; they use a different view of sailcraft trajectory: the orbital angular momentum reversal via solar radiation pressure. In Chap. 6, how solar irradiance can result in thrust has been detailed. May one utilize both thrust and solar gravity in order to notably increase sailcraft speed, hopefully well higher than the speed obtainable by spiraling about the Sun? The theory of fast sailing is explained for two-dimensional as well as three-dimensional trajectories. The second set is not a mere extension of the first one. Theory relies on some meaningful theorems and propositions. Many numerical cases are discussed with full particulars.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, departure means either heliocentric injection of sailcraft after a planetocentric escape orbit or four directly-specified heliocentric ICs.
- 2.
Note that these differential equations lend themselves to a natural generalization of the L-control.
- 3.
In the Nineties, the author found numerically only a part of the quadrant, i.e. that one approximately delimited by \(0.5 < \mathcal {L} _{\mathrm{r}}< 1\) and \(-0.5 < \mathcal {L} _{\mathrm{t}}< 0\). Such subregion, though, allowed him to study many meaningful cases of 2D trajectories.
- 4.
It is important to remind the reader that—for any \(\mathcal {L} _{\mathrm {r}}> 0\)—the sailcraft senses Sun as having the reduced gravitational constant \((1- \mathcal {L} _{\mathrm{r}}) \upmu _{\odot }\). Thus, \(\mathcal {L} _{\mathrm{r}}=1/2\) (and \(\mathcal {L} _{\mathrm{t}}=0\)) applied to a classical Keplerian circular orbit means that the orbit is actually a parabola, as one can easily check via the energy equation.
- 5.
The H-reversal concept may be utilized for heliocentric periodic orbits provided that the number of reversal points is even (see Sect. 8.5), and sufficiently large even under the (unavoidable) planetary perturbations. However, fast trajectories and periodic orbits would not share some properties, as expected.
- 6.
Using a flat-sail model for visualization, the azimuth of the sail axis changes from α d to −α d , then it is kept unchanged.
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Vulpetti, G. (2013). The Theory of Fast Solar Sailing. In: Fast Solar Sailing. Space Technology Library, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4777-7_7
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