Journal
SCIENCE CHINA-TECHNOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 55, Issue 3, Pages 848-855Publisher
SCIENCE PRESS
DOI: 10.1007/s11431-011-4691-7
Keywords
solar sail; sun-synchronous orbit; frozen orbit
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [10902056, 10832004]
- State Key Lab of Astronautical Dynamics of China [2011ADL-DW0201]
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Solar sail is used to achieve a geocentric sun-synchronous frozen orbit. This kind of orbit combines the characteristics of both sun-synchronous orbits and frozen orbits. Furthermore, the impossible orbits for a typical spacecraft such as sun-synchronous orbits whose inclination is less than 90 are also possible for solar sail. To achieve a sun-synchronous frozen orbit, the characteristic acceleration of the sail is chosen properly. In addition, the attitude of the sail is adjusted to keep the sun-synchronous and frozen characteristics. The perturbations including atmosphere drag, third-body gravitational forces and shaded regions are discussed, where the atmosphere drag is cancelled by solar radiation pressure force, third-body gravitational forces have negligible effects on the orbit and the shaded region can be avoided by choosing the classical orbit elements of the sail. At last, a numerical example is employed to validate the sun-synchronous frozen characteristics of the sail.
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