| High energy small body missions using solar sail propulsion (2006) | |||||||||||
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| A range of mission concepts will be discussed which explore the use of solar sail propulsion for high-energy small body missions. It will be shown that a modest sized solar sail can enable high energy small body sample return from extremely demanding targets, while a larger solar sail can quickly deliver a significant payload to high eccentricity comets. Lastly, it will be shown that potentially hazardous near Earth asteroids can be deflected using kinetic energy impacts by using a solar sail to deliver the impactor to a high-energy retrograde orbit. | |||||||||||
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