Les Johnson will hold a special seminar about the Solar Cruise Solar Sail Technology Demonstration Mission at 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 2. Registration for the WebEx event is required. 

Abstract

Selected by NASA as the technology demonstration mission to launch with the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) mission in 2025, the Solar Cruiser mission will mature solar sail technology for use in future Heliophysics missions, as well as missions of interest across a broad user community including NOAA, Earth, and Planetary Sciences. Solar sails, which use reflected sunlight to derive thrust, can be used to create artificial equilibria and near-indefinite station-keeping at locations sunward of L1 along the Sun Earth Line (SEL), or at any desired offset from the SEL leading or trailing the Earth in its orbit. They can change the heliocentric inclination of a spacecraft from the ecliptic to as high as solar polar, stopping and remaining at any intermediate inclination orbit in between or can be used around a range of solar system bodies.

The Solar Cruiser mission will fly a small spacecraft (~100 kg) with a large (>1600 square meter) solar sail containing embedded reflectivity control devices (RCDs) and photovoltaic cells, attaining a characteristic acceleration of >0.12 mm/s². The mission concept includes deployment of the solar sail, validation of all sail subsystems, controlled station-keeping inside of the Sun-Earth L1 point, demonstration of pointing performance for science imaging, and finally an increase in heliocentric inclination (out of the ecliptic plane).

Solar Cruiser will serve as a pathfinder for missions that observe the solar environment from unique vantage points such as a high inclination solar mission, opening a fundamentally new range of observational capabilities for the Heliophysics Program and for space weather monitoring. Observations away from the Sun-Earth line (SEL) present unique opportunities for answering the outstanding science questions of Heliophysics, for improving space-weather monitoring and prediction, and for revealing new discoveries about our Sun and solar system. High solar inclinations are particularly compelling. Investment in, and demonstration of, the technology needed to enable polar missions is essential to making this unique vantage point a reality in the next decade.

Bio

Les Johnson serves as a Principal Investigator of two interplanetary solar sail space missions at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The first, Near Earth Asteroid Scout, scheduled for spaceflight in 2021, will use a 925 square foot solar sail to propel a small spacecraft to rendezvous with an asteroid. The second, Solar Cruiser, will demonstrate the ability of a ~17,000 square foot solar sail-propelled spacecraft to perform heliophysical and space weather observations of the sun from novel destinations. He is also a Co-Investigator on the planned Lightweight Integrated Solar Array and anTenna (LISA-T) technology demonstration mission and for three current NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts studies. During his career at NASA, Johnson served as the Manager for the Space Science Programs and Projects Office and the In-Space Propulsion Technology Project; and Deputy Manager for the Advanced Concepts Office.

Johnson is a founding member of the Interstellar Research Group and served as the Program Chair for all six of their biannual interstellar symposia. He is a Corresponding Member of the International Academy of Astronautics, a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the National Space Society, and MENSA. He serves on IAA Study Groups and has guest edited several issues of the journal Acta Astronautica.

Publisher’s Weekly noted “The spirit of Arthur C. Clarke and his contemporaries is alive and well…” when describing his 2018 novel, Mission to Methone. Johnson's 2018 non-fiction book, Graphene: The Superstrong, Superthin, and Superversatile Material That Will Revolutionize the World, was reviewed in the journal Nature and excerpted in American Scientist.