Solar Cruiser TRAC Boom Development

The TRAC boom studied is a 30 meter, high-aspect ratio and highly nonlinear structural
element planned for the NASA Solar Cruiser spacecraft where it would serve as the solar sail’s
skeletal system designed to deploy the packaged reflective sail membrane as well as support
operational sail tension loads for flight. Key design drivers for this boom are understanding
and characterizing load-deformation behavior and quantifying buckling performance–under
flight conditions (zero gravity). Knowing that the full-scale solar sail system cannot be feasibly
tested for flight conditions under Earth’s gravity, a building block approach is methodically
followed to verify finite element analysis (FEA) predictions and to evolve the finite element model
(FEM) accordingly, beginning with the lowest level complexity to match global elastic behavior
to the highest level complexity to bound theoretical responses under conservative expected flight
conditions. Although the testing campaign for the TRAC boom has not developed yet to produce
a full-scale test data point that loads the boom to failure, the fidelity of simulations have evolved
with success and warrant further interest and work on this high-aspect ratio, but highly stable,
deployable structural boom.