Description
Electric sails (E-sails) are a spacecraft propulsion method that uses flowing environmental plasma such as the solar wind or the Earth’s ionosphere to move a spacecraft, like how a sail on a boat uses the wind for propulsion. Unlike the sails on a boat, what captures the momentum of the flow is not a physical sail but the electric field around wires held at high voltage. Even though the concept of E-sails has been around for more than two decades and there have been multiple attempts to deploy them on CubeSats, there has been no experiment either on the ground or in space that has measured or shown the force produced by an E-sail. We have addressed this by measuring the force on a model E-sail in a ground-based plasma experiment using a pulsed cathodic arc as a source of flowing plasma. The results were compared to an existing theoretical model of E-sails proposed by Janhunen, finding that they match within experimental error. We also present a continuation of this work measuring the force on E-sails, now in a continuous flowing plasma with controllable ion velocity and density.
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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