Robust Solar Sail Trajectory Design under Uncertainty with Application to NEA Scout Mission

Solar sailing is an emerging technology that harnesses solar radiation pressure to propel spacecraft, providing the potential to enable longer-duration, higher Delta-V missions. To ensure successful solar sailing missions, mission designers need to design trajectories that are robust against uncertainty due to navigation error, control error, and unplanned transition to the safe mode. Based on deterministic and stochastic approaches, this study develops frameworks that design robust solar sailing trajectories under such uncertainty. The developed frameworks are applied to the NEA Scout mission, a NASA's CubeSat solar sailing asteroid exploration mission onboard Artemis I.