Optical solar sail degradation modelling

Dachwald, Bernd and Mengali, Giovanni and Quarta, Alessandro A. and Macdonald, Malcolm and McInnes, Colin R. (2007) Optical solar sail degradation modelling. In: 1st International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS 2007), 2007-06-27 - 2007-06-29.

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Abstract

We propose a simple parametric OSSD model that describes the variation of the sail film's optical coefficients with time, depending on the sail film's environmental history, i.e., the radiation dose. The primary intention of our model is not to describe the exact behavior of specific film-coating combinations in the real space environment, but to provide a more general parametric framework for describing the general optical degradation behavior of solar sails.