Solar & Electric Sailing Overview

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Near Earth Asteroid Scout: NASA's Solar Sail Mission to a NEA

NASA is developing a solar sail propulsion system for use on the Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout reconnaissance mission and laying the groundwork for their use in future deep space science and exploration missions. Solar sails use sunlight to propel vehicles through space by reflecting solar photons from a large, mirror-like sail made of a lightweight, highly reflective material. This continuous photon pressure provides propellant-less thrust, allowing for very high delta V maneuvers on long-duration, deep space exploration. Since reflected light produces thrust, solar sails require no onboard propellant. The Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout mission, funded by NASAs Advanced Exploration Systems Program and managed by NASA MSFC, will use the sail as primary propulsion allowing it to survey and image Asteroid 1991VG and, potentially, other NEAs of interest for possible future human exploration. The NEA Scout spacecraft is housed in a 6U CubeSat-form factor and utilizes an 86 square meter solar sail for a total mass less than 14 kilograms. The mission is in partnership with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with support from Langley Research Center and science participants from various institutions. NEA Scout will be launched on the maiden flight of the Space Launch System in 2019. The solar sail for NEA Scout will be based on the technology developed and flown by the NASA NanoSail-D and flown on The Planetary Societys Lightsail-A. Four approximately-7-meter stainless steel booms wrapped on two spools (two overlapping booms per spool) will be motor driven and pull the sail from its stowed volume. The sail material is an aluminized polyimide approximately 2.5 microns thick. As the technology matures, solar sails will increasingly be used to enable science and exploration missions that are currently impossible or prohibitively expensive using traditional chemical and electric propulsion systems. This paper will summarize the status of the NEA Scout mission and solar sail technology in general

Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout Solar Sail Implementation

The Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout mission is an innovative CubeSat concept manifested on Space Launch System (SLS) Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1), the first planned flight of the SLS and second uncrewed test flight of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. This paper will focus on mission elements involved in the implementation of a solar sail on a deep space CubeSat mission and will leverage component and subsystem test and analysis results. Spacecraft configuration dependencies and constraints will be addressed including the manipulation of the spacecraft center-of-mass and center-of-pressure relationship through a new enabling technology, the Active Mass Translator (AMT). Prediction of the resulting propulsive solar sail characteristics through thrust model development and associated impacts on mission design and trajectory resiliency will also be included. Subsequent to these inputs, imposed power and telecommunication constraints and overall impacts on the mission ConOps will be outlined. Breadboard and engineering development unit test results will be presented in the context of these system-level dependencies to provide developmental lessons learned and address competing spacecraft needs. The 6U solar sail-propelled CubeSat will address human exploration-focused Strategic Knowledge Gaps. NEA Scout will perform a close and slow rendezvous to provide the first imagery and characterization of a NEA in them² solar sail to serve as the primary means of propulsion to the NEA providing a ΔV up to two kilometers per second, a magnitude currently impossible to meet with other high technology readiness level CubeSat-sized propulsion systems. Momentum exchange between the Sun\u27s photons and the solar sail membrane provides the means necessary to perform a long duration deep space cruise and perform a NEA rendezvous at(resource utilization, planetary defense, human operations, and science) and paves the way for future multi-spacecraft exploration of NEAs. Using an optical imaging payload, NEA Scout will characterize the morphology, rotational and orbital properties, volume, color type and meteoritic classification, as well as the dust/debris environment of the target. NEA Scout is funded through NASA\u27s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate\u27s Advanced Exploration Systems program and is under joint development by the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The missions leverage technologies and experience gained from JPL\u27s deep-space CubeSat developments (Interplanetary Nano-Spacecraft Pathfinder In Relevant Environment (INSPIRE) and Mars Cube One (MarCO)) and MSFC\u27s NanoSail-D2, the first CubeSat mission to deploy a solar sail

Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout

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Development Testing and Subsequent Failure Investigation of a Spring Strut Mechanism

Commodities are transferred between the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) crew module (CM) and service module (SM) via an external umbilical that is driven apart with spring-loaded struts after the structural connection is severed. The spring struts must operate correctly for the modules to separate safely. There was no vibration testing of strut development units scoped in the MPCV Program Plan; therefore, any design problems discovered as a result of vibration testing would not have been found until the component qualification. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) and Lockheed Martin (LM) performed random vibration testing on a single spring strut development unit to assess its ability to withstand qualification level random vibration environments. Failure of the strut while exposed to random vibration resulted in a follow-on failure investigation, design changes, and additional development tests. This paper focuses on the results of the failure investigations including identified lessons learned and best practices to aid in future design iterations of the spring strut and to help other mechanism developers avoid similar pitfalls

Development Testing and Subsequent Failure Investigation of a Spring Strut Mechanism

No abstract availabl

New Moon Explorer Mission Concept

New Moon Explorer (NME) is a smallsat reconnaissance mission concept to explore Earths New Moon, the recently discovered Earth orbital companion asteroid 469219 Kamooalewa (formerly 2016HO3), using solar sail propulsion. NME would determine Kamooalewas spin rate, pole position, shape, structure, mass, density, chemical composition, temperature, thermal inertia, regolith characteristics, and spectral type using onboard instrumentation. If flown, NME would demonstrate multiple enabling technologies, including solar sail propulsion, large-area thin film power generation, and small spacecraft technology tailored for interplanetary space missions. Leveraging the solar sail technology and mission expertise developed by NASA for the Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout mission, affordably learning more about our newest near neighbor is now a possibility. The mission is not yet planned for flight

New Moon Explorer (NME) Robotic Mission Concept

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Observation of associated near-side and away-side long-range correlations in √sNN=5.02 TeV proton-lead collisions with the ATLAS detector

Two-particle correlations in relative azimuthal angle (Δϕ) and pseudorapidity (Δη) are measured in √sNN=5.02  TeV p+Pb collisions using the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The measurements are performed using approximately 1  μb-1 of data as a function of transverse momentum (pT) and the transverse energy (ΣETPb) summed over 3.1<η<4.9 in the direction of the Pb beam. The correlation function, constructed from charged particles, exhibits a long-range (2<|Δη|<5) “near-side” (Δϕ∼0) correlation that grows rapidly with increasing ΣETPb. A long-range “away-side” (Δϕ∼π) correlation, obtained by subtracting the expected contributions from recoiling dijets and other sources estimated using events with small ΣETPb, is found to match the near-side correlation in magnitude, shape (in Δη and Δϕ) and ΣETPb dependence. The resultant Δϕ correlation is approximately symmetric about π/2, and is consistent with a dominant cos⁡2Δϕ modulation for all ΣETPb ranges and particle pT

Search for displaced vertices arising from decays of new heavy particles in 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

We present the results of a search for new, heavy particles that decay at a significant distance from their production point into a final state containing charged hadrons in association with a high-momentum muon. The search is conducted in a pp-collision data sample with a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 33 pb^-1 collected in 2010 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron Collider. Production of such particles is expected in various scenarios of physics beyond the standard model. We observe no signal and place limits on the production cross-section of supersymmetric particles in an R-parity-violating scenario as a function of the neutralino lifetime. Limits are presented for different squark and neutralino masses, enabling extension of the limits to a variety of other models.Comment: 8 pages plus author list (20 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version to appear in Physics Letters