Summary of NASA's Electric Sail Propulsion System Investigations from 2014-2017

摘要

This paper will report on the overall findings on the benefits of Electrostatic Sail (E-Sail) Propulsion in deep space. The work was performed at NASA's MSFC by a small team that has been active over the past three years in various areas of analytical and experimental support. All of this work is to be published January/February of 2018 in a forthcoming NASA Technical Publication. Therefore, the work presented herein will be primarily the various results and conclusions that were drawn from this multi-year endeavor. Our assembled team was investigating this propulsion concept to determine if it is feasible and what are the various technology gaps or hurdles that must be closed out before any space hardware is built. In summary, the team performed extensive plasma chamber testing and performed rigorous data analysis to arrive at the results presented.