Design concept for In-Drag Sail with individually controllable elements

The lifetime of the existing attitude and orbit control systems (AOCS) generally depends on the amount of the fuel carried on a spacecraft. This paper proposes a novel design concept for a low Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft named In-Drag Sail with Individually Controllable Elements (IDSICE), which can release the fuel's limitation to its attitude control system. IDSICE is designed to have four different working modes, which are Compression and Storage mode (CS mode), Orbital Flight mode (OF mode), Attitude Control mode (AC mode), and De-Orbiting mode (DO mode). By switching between different modes, it can achieve different missions. When IDSICE is in AC mode, the aerodynamic torques can be applied to completed the attitude control phase. When IDSICE is in DO mode, its area-to-mass ratio is enlarged so that the orbit altitude can decrease rapidly to achieve the de-orbiting phase at the end of the life. The decentralized layout is applied in IDSICE and most components have redundant backups, which allows a higher fault tolerance compared with the conventional layout. Finally, some necessary simulations are made, which verified the feasibility of the attitude control and de-orbiting methods proposed based on IDSICE. (C) 2019 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.