Exploring the Kuiper Belt with Sun-diving Solar Sails

Elena Ancona, Roman Ya. Kezerashvili, Gregory L. Matloff
(Submitted on 30 Sep 2018)

We discuss a possibility to survey many Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO) with a single launch using a few smallscale spacecraft, each equipped with solar sails, which could be unfurled from a single interplanetary bus at the perihelion of that craft’s solar orbit. Each small-scale spacecraft would carry a scientific payload and would be directed to intersect one or more KBOs. The proposed scenario is the following: the sails are carried as a payload to a relatively small heliocentric distance (0.1 – 0.3 AU). Once at the perihelion, the sails are deployed. Besides electromagnetic propulsion due to the solar radiation, another mechanism could be convenient: thermal desorption, a physical process of mass loss which can provide additional thrust as heating liberates atoms, embedded on the surface of a solar sail. Therefore, the sails experience additional propulsive force due to the thermal desorption that dramatically increases the distance that sails travel per year.

Comments:    6 pages, 6 figures
Subjects:    Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph); Space Physics (physics.space-ph)
Report number:    Paper: IAC-18-A7.2.5.47547, 69th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Bremen, Germany, 1-5 October 2018
Cite as:    arXiv:1810.00407 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:1810.00407v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Roman Kezerashvili
[v1] Sun, 30 Sep 2018 15:47:32 GMT (1656kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.00407