LightSail-1 Solar Sail Design and Qualification

摘要

LightSail-1, a project of The Planetary Society, is a Solar Sail Demonstration mission built on the CubeSat platform. Stellar Exploration Inc. designed, built and fully qualified the Solar Sail module for LightSail-1 which includes a boom deployer mechanism that stows a total boom length of 16 meters (4 × 4 meter booms) which are used to deploy a 32-m~2 sail membrane in a 2U package. This design utilizes the rigid TRAC boom developed by AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory) for deploying and tensioning the membrane that makes up the sail. In order to maximize the size of the solar sail, the boom deployer took on a unique shape to maximize packaging efficiency and achieve an 80:1 deployed to pre-deployed ratio. This paper will discuss the design challenges, unique design features as well system verification for LightSail-1.