Refined thrust model of electric sail and analysis of deep space detection performance

The electric solar wind sail (electric sail lor short) is an innovative concept for spacecraft propulsion, which can generate continuous thrust without propellant by reflecting solar wind ions. In previous studies, the thrust of an electric sail is described by a classical model, which neglected the effects of the electric sail attitude on the propulsive thrust modulus and direction. The aim of this paper is to reappraise the performance of the electric sail in the Earth-Mars exploration mission with a refined thrust model, which considered the effect of the spacecraft attitude on both the thrust modulus and direction. The simulation results show that the flight times with the refined analytical thrust model are longer than that with classical thrust model. The reason for this phenomenon is that the classical thrust model ignores the attitude change effect on the thrust acceleration, and overestimate the maximum thrust cone angle.