Experiment and Analysis of Spinning Membrane Deployment Focusing on Shape Imbalance for Solar Sail

Abstract

The small solar power sail demonstrator IKAROS was developed and launched in 2010 by JAXA and deployed its large membrane successfully. Through IKAROS's on-orbit operation, one of the most critical problems was a sail's shape imbalance during the sail deployment sequence. This paper focuses on the evaluation and consideration of the sail's imbalance through high vacuum experiments using a scale-down sail model. The experimental results obtained using the specially designed rotating mechanism and a small scale model lead to a hypothesis of the reason for the IKAROS's imbalanced deployment. The experimental results are extrapolated up to IKAROS's scale, using dimensionless analyses.