抄録
IKAROS is a small solar power sail demonstration spacecraft developed by JAXA. The spacecraft launched on May 2010 succeeded in deploying a thin solar power sail membrane with 14 meters in width and 7.5 micrometers in thickness. The membrane was folded and wrapped around the spacecraft and unfurled by centrifugal force in two stages. Since the deployment test of the large thin membrane is impossible on the ground, a huge amount of numerical simulations were performed before launch by employing the multi-particle system model (MPM) and the nonlinear elasto-dynamic finite element analysis (NEDA). MPM approximates a thin membrane with a spring-mass-damper system and enables fast numerical simulations. NEDA is based on the energy momentum method which preserves the total energy, the linear momentum and the angular momentum and enables reliable simulations of flexible multi-body systems. In this paper, their numerical results are compared with flight data and the deployment behaviors of the membrane are discussed.
