Navigation of a Solar Sail

NASA has chosen the Sunjammer Solar Sail Demonstrator mission as one of its Technology Demonstration Missions (TDMs). Named after a short story written by Sir Arthur C. Clarke, L·Garde Inc. of Tustin, California, is developing the solar sail to demonstrate propellantless in-space propulsion and novel capabilities of solar sail navigation. For this program, L·Garde and Applied Defense Solutions (ADS) began development of a navigation plan to enable the Sunjammer Solar Sail Demonstrator to navigate to an artificial Lagrange orbit (ALO) located sunward of the sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point. This orbit and related ones that position a sail out of the ecliptic plane are useful for space weather, remote sensing, and communications. This paper describes the development efforts made in calibrating a real non-ideal sail, determining orbit parameters in the presence of significant solar radiation pressure, and planning sail steering maneuvers to follow a desired trajectory to a desired orbit destination. With flight opportunities in development after a series of ground deployment and qualification tests in 2015 and 2016, demonstration of these significant cutting-edge technologies is right around the corner and will initiate a new era of space exploration.