Electric sail, photonic sail and deorbiting applications of the freely guided photonic blade

TL;DR

The paper introduces a freely guided photonic blade (FGPB) that enhances electric sails, photonic sails, and satellite deorbiting by allowing active control, scalability, and higher packing density, with potential for low-cost demonstration.

Contribution

It proposes the FGPB as a versatile, scalable, and actively controllable component for electric sails, photonic sails, and satellite deorbiting, improving upon existing designs.

Findings

FGPB enables active management of electric sail tethers.

It allows larger, more densely packed photonic sail blades.

Potential for low-cost ground and space demonstrations.

Abstract

We consider a freely guided photonic blade (FGPB) which is a centrifugally stretched sheet of photonic sail membrane that can be tilted by changing the centre of mass or by other means. The FGPB can be installed at the tip of each main tether of an electric solar wind sail (E-sail) so that one can actively manage the tethers to avoid their mutual collisions and to modify the spin rate of the sail if needed. This enables a more scalable and modular E-sail than the baseline approach where auxiliary tethers are used for collision avoidance. For purely photonic sail applications one can remove the tethers and increase the size of the blades to obtain a novel variant of the heliogyro that can have a significantly higher packing density than the traditional heliogyro. For satellite deorbiting in low Earth orbit (LEO) conditions, analogous designs exist where the E-sail effect is replaced by the negative polarity plasma brake effect and the photonic pressure by atmospheric drag. We conclude that the FGPB appears to be an enabling technique for diverse applications. We also outline a way of demonstrating it on ground and in LEO at low cost.