Heliogyro

Select here for the heliogyro POV source.

The heliogyro was a design considered by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a mission to Halley's Comet. The sail consists of several very long (twelve vanes, seven km in length in the JPL design) vanes extenting from a central hub. The vanes are deployed from rollers by spinning the craft. The centripetal force pulls the sails outwards, unrolling them. The vehicle continues to spin in order to keep the vanes tight. It steers by tilting the vanes, which redirects the solar pressure.

This heliogyro is the final design by the Canadian Solar Sail Project. Unlike the JPL designs, this craft steers by shifting a ballast mass so that the center of the craft's mass is misaligned from the center of solar pressure on the sails. This creates torques which turn the craft.

This illustration is by Paul Fjeld, an artist/engineer who does a lot of PR illustration for the Canadian Space Agency. The picture was contributed by Christopher Neufeld.

Please send comments, questions, or contributions to Benjamin Diedrich -- diedrich@ugcs.caltech.edu
Back to Solar Sails -- http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~diedrich/solarsails
Back to Benjamin Diedrich's home page -- http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~diedrich/
Last modified: Fri Jan 22 01:46:20 PST 1999