Development of a Lightweight Pulsed Plasma Thruster Module for Solar Sail Attitude Control

This paper describes a preliminary development of a lightweight pulsed plasma thruster (PPT) module with an impulse bit of 150 ìÍ-s, named PPT150. A prototype PPT150 module, consisting of three thruster units and sharing a capacitor, was designed for attitude control of a 100-kg, 40-m class sailcraft with a moment of inertia of 2000 kg-m2 and with a solar pressure disturbance torque of 1 mN-m. Such a 40-m sailcraft is mainly propelled by the 10-mN solar-radiation-pressure force and its attitude is controlled mainly by a primary propellantless attitude control system (ACS). A secondary ACS employing four tip-mounted PPT modules is proposed as a backup to such a propellantless ACS. The development of the PPT150 is one of the steps towards a ground validation experiment of a complete ACS integrated into a fully deployed 20-m scalable sailcraft of AEC-Able Engineering. The ground experiment is scheduled for early 2005 in the 30-m thermal vacuum chamber at the Plum Brook Space Power Facility of the NASA Glenn Research Center