A Spin-up Control Scheme for Contingency Deployment of the Sailcraft IKAROS

The small solar power sail demonstrator Ikaros successfully deployed its sail by a nominal sequence, which consists of two stages. However, in case of anomaly of the deployment mechanism, a one-step dynamic deployment of the sail might be employed as a contingency plan. This paper proposes a spin-up control scheme that enables the one-step deployment of Ikaros’s sail, and evaluates the controlled responses using a numerical multi-particle model.