Applications of Solar Sail Technology Towards Conventional Missions

Solar sail spacecraft feature several unique technologies in order to achieve mission success. These include being able to deploy long and lightweight booms, extremely thin film material, active mass translators, reflectivity control devices, and in space wireless systems. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has heavily invested in these technologies for flight projects such as Nanosail D2, NEAScout, and Solar Cruiser. These technologies can be adapted towards conventional missions to provide unique capabilities previously not available or vast improvements over conventional methods. These capabilities include lengthy deployable structures for large antenna arrays, extremely thin solar panels for more power with less mass, propellentless momentum management actuators to reduce propellent usage, low jitter pointing control actuators enabling fine pointing missions, and unwired connections on a spacecraft. These technologies will not only benefit conventional missions but will also benefit solar sail missions by providing an alternative means to work on maturing them. This paper will dive into these solar sail technologies and the added benefits they provide for conventional missions.