Solar Sail Propulsion by 2050: An Enabling Capability for Heliophysics Missions
Solar sails enable missions to observe the solar environment from unique vantage points, such as sustained observations away from the Sun-Earth line; sub-L1 station keeping; high inclination solar orbits; Earth polar-sitting and polar-viewing observatories; fast transit missions to study heliosphere to interstellar medium transition, as well as missions of interest across a broad user community.
Recent and planned demonstration missions make this technology ready for use on near-term science missions.
Les Johnson, Nathan Barnes, Matteo Ceriotti, Thomas Y. Chen, Artur Davoyan, Louis Friedman, Darren Garber, Roman Kezerashvili, Ken Kobayashi, Greg Matloff, Colin McInnes, Pat Mulligan, Grover Swartzlander, Slava G. Turyshev
Comments: Heliophysics 2050 White Paper
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2301.01297 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2301.01297v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2301.01297
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Submission history
From: Thomas Y. Chen
[v1] Tue, 3 Jan 2023 04:31:55 UTC (129 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01297
