Interplanetary flight using solar sails

This research is dedicated to show the possibility of using solar radiation pressure by solar sails for interplanetary flights. In this paper, in addition to the introduction of solar sailing and physics of solar radiation pressure, the solar sail orbital dynamics for optimal trajectory of an ideal solar sail spacecraft has been studied. It considers the problem of optimal controlling the sail angle so as to execute a minimum-time coplanar orbit transfer from the circular initial orbit to the circular target orbit. The direct collocation optimal control technique is used to transform the state equations to a set of nonlinear algebraic constraint equations. The results of state and control variables for solar sails with different lightness number and the obtained optimal trajectory have been presented by several graphs.