# Attitude and orbit coupling of planar helio-stable solar sails

## TL;DR

This paper investigates the coupled attitude and orbit dynamics of planar helio-stable solar sails, simplifying the complex system through averaging techniques to analyze their behavior and stability.

## Contribution

It introduces a simplified model of solar sail dynamics by averaging out fast attitude phases, focusing on orbit perturbations caused by a fixed sail orientation.

## Key findings

- The system can be modeled as a fast-slow dynamical system.
- Averaging out the fast attitude phase simplifies the analysis.
- Numerical simulations validate the simplified model.

## Abstract

The coupled attitude and orbit dynamics of solar sails is studied. The shape of the sail is a simplified quasi-rhombic-pyramid that provides the structure helio-stablility properties. After adimensionalisation, the system is put in the form of a fast-slow dynamical system where the different time scales are explicitely related to the physical parameters of the system. The orientation of the body frame with respect to the inertial orbit frame is a fast phase that can be averaged out. This gives rise to a simplified formulation that only consists of the orbit dynamics perturbed by a flat sail with fixed attitude perpendicular to the direction of the sunlight. The results are exemplified using numerical simulations.