The Solar Sail Materials Project: Results of Activities

Introduced at ISSS 2010, the Solar Sail Materials (SSM) project conducted for ESA came to its end at the beginning of 2013 with interesting and practical results. The project, relying also on past major European solar sails design projects, aimed at developing and testing future sail technologies suitable for large solar sailcrafts featuring low Sail Film Areal Density σFilm. The proposed paper presents the project’s achievements, mainly in the fields of Sail film and coating materials, Sail-to-Structure Interfaces (SSIF) and, Correlation of ground sail tensioning strategies with 3D imaging and Finite Element Model (FEM) simulations.