Attitude control using ion thrusters for solar sailing from Low Earth Orbit to sub-L1

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the possibility of using gridded ion thrusters as a means of attitude control for a solar sail as a part of the sunshade project, which aims to place 10^8 solar sail sunshade spacecraft, each with an area of about 10 000 m^2, at the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point L1 in order to reduce Earth's global temperature. Two types of solar sail sunshade spacecraft were studied. The first type, referred to as the sunshade demonstrator, had an area of 100 m^2 and a mass of 10 kg, and the second type, referred to as the full-sized sunshade, had an area of 10 000 m^2 and a mass of 90 kg. To determine the significance of using ion thrusters for the attitude control system, the mass of the required fuel, as well as the total mass that had to be added to the spacecraft to implement the attitude control system, was calculated. Two types of journeys were studied for each spacecraft type: starting from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to L1 and from Geostationary Orbit (GEO) to L1, respectively. The results showed that the duration of the journey of the full-sized spacecraft was about 570 days from LEO to L1 and 370 from GEO to L1, respectively. The required amounts of fuel for the respective journeys were 580 g and 15 g, respectively, and resulted in a total additional mass of 7.8 kg and 7.2 kg, respectively.