Electric Sail for a Near-Earth Asteroid Sample Return Mission: Case 1998 KY26
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 27, Issue 6
Abstract
The electric solar wind sail (E-sail) is an innovative propellantless concept for interplanetary space propulsion that uses the natural solar wind as a thrust source with the help of long, artificially charged tethers. The characteristic property of an E-sail based spacecraft is that the propulsive acceleration scales as the inverse Sun-spacecraft distance, and the thrust vector can be varied within about 30 deg away from radial direction. The aim of this paper is to estimate the transfer times required to fulfill a mission toward the near-Earth asteroid 1998 KY26. In doing so the propulsive acceleration of the E-sail, at a reference distance from the Sun, is used as a performance parameter so that the numerical results are applicable to E-sails of different sizes and different payload masses. The paper shows that the flight time scales nearly linearly with the inverse of the spacecraft maximum propulsive acceleration at 1 astronomical unit from the Sun, when the acceleration is greater than . For smaller propulsive accelerations the relationship for the flight time is more involved, because the transfer trajectory is complex and more than one revolution around the Sun is necessary to accomplish the mission. The numerical analysis involves a sample return mission in which the total flight time is parametrically correlated with the starting date for a given E-sail propulsion system.
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Acknowledgments
This research was financed within the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme [(FP7/2007-2013)] under grant agreement number 262,733 and the Academy of Finland grant decision 250,591.
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Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 27 • Issue 6 • November 2014
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 30, 2012
Accepted: Oct 11, 2012
Published online: May 19, 2014
Discussion open until: Oct 19, 2014
Published in print: Nov 1, 2014
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