Ground Experiment of Membrane Deployment for Spinning Formation-Flight Solar Sail

摘要

In the paper, a new type membrane deployment method is proposed, and locally full-deployment state can be achieved in the deployment from folded state. The authors conduct fundamental ground experiments of the proposed membrane deployment using an experimental set-up system including two-dimensional micro-gravity simulators, and tether and membrane control mechanisms developed at Tokyo Institute of Technology. The simulator system is composed of a 3m~*5m flat-floor glass and floating satellite simulators with gas-thruster. The authors use 3 satellite simulators, triangular membranes, the tether control system and newly developed drum mechanisms for membrane control. The drum mechanism can control membrane extension speed. A virtual structure control method is applied to control the three satellites for formation flight, and PID type control is adopted to control the the membrane control. From the experiment the authors obtain 2-dimentional deployment behavior and discuss the feasibility of the proposed method comparing with corresponding numerical simulation results.