Dynamics, geometry and solar sails (Q344740)

The solar sailing is a new promising technology that makes long-term spacecraft missions more accessible and opens a big set of new opportunities. This nice paper mainly focuses on the mathematical analysis of the dynamics around the artificial libration point orbits that are obtained as a consequence of the sail. Due to the acceleration given by the sail, the classical libration points of the restricted three-body problem are substituted by these new artificial libration points whose position depend on the sail orientation with respect to the Sun. In particular, the paper addresses two main topics by means of geometrical ideas: the station keeping maintenance and the dynamical analysis of the vicinity of artificial libration points near an asteroid. For the first one the authors consider sail maneuvers to cancel the unstable component of the motion and they consider an application to the Geostorm mission. For the second one, they consider the augmented Hill model, thus applying a methodology known as reduction to the center manifold. The resulting dynamics is very rich and the results of the analysis are very well discussed in terms of Poincaré maps.