Collinear artificial equilibrium point maintenance with a wrinkled solar sail

Propellantless propulsion systems allow innovative mission scenarios to be envisaged, including the generation and the stabilization of artificial equilibrium points in the circular restricted three-body problem. This paper discusses the generation of collinear, L1-type, artificial equilibrium points in the Sun-[Earth+Moon] system, using a (photonic) solar sail. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate the spacecraft dynamics and its control when the sail propulsive acceleration is described with a recent thrust model that accounts for the presence of wrinkles on the membrane surface. In particular, an H∞ static output-feedback control based on reflectivity control devices is proposed to stabilize the spacecraft around the L1-type artificial equilibrium point, and a procedure is described for estimating the required area covered by those devices as a fraction of the whole solar sail surface.