COLLOQUIUM: Status report and review of Electric Solar Wind Sail spacecraft propulsion
by
Pekka Janhunen(Finnish Meteorological Institute)
→
Europe/Stockholm
Oskar Klein Auditorium
Oskar Klein Auditorium
Description
The electric solar wind sail (E-sail) is a newly invented method for using
the solar wind dynamic pressure for producing propulsion for spacecraft.
The E-sail consists of a set of long, thin, conducting and centrifugally
stretched tethers which are kept positively charged by continuously
operating an onboard solar-powered electron gun. The thrust effect is based
on Coulombic drag that the moving solar wind exerts on the tethers and its
magnitude per length is around 500 nN/m. Using today's materials and
technologies, an E-sail producing 1 N of thrust and weighing about 100 kg
should be possible, and not too difficult, to build. This system would beat
currently used space propulsion techniques (chemical rockets and ion
engines) by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude if the lifetime-integrated total
impulse per system mass is used as the figure of merit. A simple test
mission ESTCube-1 (planned launch 2012) is under construction for measuring
the electric sail effect in orbit for the first time. This lecture gives a
summary of the present status of the physics and technology of the electric
sail and its potential applications in a large variety of solar system
missions.
