Analysis of the nonideal solar sailing with deformation

The topic of this paper is to study the influence induced by the deformed sail membrane on the trajectory design. A numerical method is adopted to model the non-ideal sail in this study. (1) Wrinkling and cambered membrane model is built to describe non-ideal sails in discrete point cloud models. Advantages and limitations of the model will be fully discussed as well. (2) Transfer trajectories within different solar sail shapes will be given to analyze the influence by considering the final position and velocity of the solar sail spacecraft. (3) A parametric study regarding the sail lightness number and the cone angle within non-ideal sail models is made with its application to the H-reversal trajectories. (4) A tradeoff is made to obtain the optimal state of the model simplification, which will be beneficial for further sail mission analyses.