Flight result and analysis of solar sail deployment experiment using S-310 sounding rocket

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is currently studying on the "Solar Sail" propulsion for future deep space explorations. One of the key technologies to realize the solar sail is how light and how compact we can make the photon acceptance surface. JAXA has conducted extensive studies on utilizing centrifugal force to deploy the photon acceptance surface. The final objective is to realize the 7.5μmthickness and 50m diameter polyimide membrane, combined with thin flexible solar cells, as the photon acceptance surface that will be needed around the Jupiter orbit. In the August 9, 2004, JAXA has launched the S-310 sounding rocket, which tested two different shapes of membranes during the zerogravity flight. The first type of the membrane looks like a "clover-leaf", and another is like a "fan". These two membranes, both of them have 10m diameter, were unfolded sequentially during the zerogravity flight under the free spin condition, and their behavior was observed by onboard cameras. This paper focuses on the "clover-leaf" solar sail, which was fully deployed successfully, and introduces the S-310-34 experiments, and then shows the flight results and postflight evaluations.