Minimum mass solar shield for terrestrial climate control

The use of a large solar shield located sunward of the Sun-Earth interior Lagrange point is considered to offset increases in mean global surface temperature due to enhanced greenhouse warming. The three-body mechanics of the problem are investigated to optimize the shield location, thus minimizing the shield mass and improving on previous studies of this concept. While shield mass is minimized, the required mass is still of order 10(11) kg to offset an enhancement of greenhouse warming of order 2 K. Clearly, such schemes require significant technological capabilities, although the optimization presented in this paper reduces the scale of the problem to some extent.