Abstract This paper regards small/midsize square sails on which a field of wrinkles appears owing to the necessary sail-membrane operations before and during the deployment. We collected a large amount of data in our laboratory. Many ten thousands of measurements had been statistically processed for characterizing some sail’s sampled membranes consisting of aluminized-polyimide layers ( 2.5 + 0.1 ) μ m thin, and loaded at vertices. Such samples have exhibited area and orientation alterations, as a whole, which can affect the propulsive acceleration of a sailcraft. Wrinkled-sail orientation has been given a thrust-specialized meaning for trajectory computation. Three-dimensional heliocentric minimum-time orbit transfer between Earth and Mercury orbits had been investigated. This had resulted in wrinkled-sail sailcraft moving on trajectories remarkably different from those ones of the corresponding ideal unwrinkled-sail sailcraft. Nevertheless, at least in the current framework, the most important result is that sail-wrinkled sailcraft’s interplanetary trajectories could be optimized without resorting to stochastic differential equations.

中文翻译：

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太阳光子帆的起皱分析

摘要 本文研究了在部署之前和部署期间由于必要的帆膜操作而出现皱纹区域的中小型方帆。我们在实验室收集了大量数据。已经对数以万计的测量进行了统计处理，以表征一些帆的采样膜，该膜由镀铝聚酰亚胺层 (2.5 + 0.1) μ m 薄组成，并在顶点处加载。这些样本总体上表现出区域和方向的改变，这会影响帆船的推进加速度。皱帆方向已被赋予用于轨迹计算的推力专用含义。已经研究了地球和水星轨道之间的三维日心最小时间轨道转移。这导致皱纹帆帆船的运动轨迹与相应的理想无皱纹帆帆船的轨迹截然不同。尽管如此，至少在目前的框架中，最重要的结果是可以优化帆纹帆船的行星际轨迹，而无需求助于随机微分方程。