Abstract
Abstract
Solar sail propulsion offers propellant-free, continuous thrust by converting the momentum of photons into spacecraft acceleration, circumventing the exponential mass penalty imposed by the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. While the underlying physics and materials have been validated in flight by missions such as JAXA's IKAROS (2010), the behavior of solar sail hardware under extreme space weather conditions and the resulting constraints on mission lifetime remain largely unexamined in the literature against real flight specifications. This paper addresses both gaps. First, it investigates the kinematic response of the IKAROS architecture to Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), determining that nominal space weather events provide a transient CME acceleration boost of 4% to 14%. To establish a conservative engineering boundary, the model is stress-tested against the reconstructed parameters of the 1859 Carrington Event, bounded by a highly conservative 10% alpha particle composition. This extreme scenario quantifies a maximized transient CME acceleration increase of roughly 69%. Furthermore, analytical derivations of the dynamically compressed plasma sheath demonstrate that despite intense electromagnetic surface-charging, the induced Lorentz disturbance torques remain over 1,300 times weaker than the mechanical control limits of legacy Reflectivity Control Devices (RCDs). A comparative material failure analysis demonstrates that this survivability is contingent on the transition from legacy Mylar to advanced polyimides (CP1/Kapton), which remains below the modeled thermomechanical limits under the Carrington-class conditions. Second, the paper introduces Net Operational Time (NOT) as a framework for bounding solar sail mission lifetime by optical and structural survivability rather than propellant depletion. This framework is quantitatively applied to the Sub-L1 sentinel mission class configuration operating permanently outside planetary magnetospheric shielding. Using SPENVIS environmental modeling and NIST PSTAR-derived proton stopping-power calculations, this analysis isolates the structural penetration threshold of the membrane at approximately 0.546 MeV. This threshold is roughly eighteen times the 30 keV bulk ram kinetic energy population characterizing the modeled Carrington sheath, indicating that bulk plasma penetration is unlikely under the modeled Carrington-class sheath conditions
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Ultimately, integrating the NOT framework with historical flight characteristics yields a crucial dual-state conclusion: while the primary polyimide membrane possesses a theoretical illustrative functional NOT estimate spanning nearly two decades, long-duration Sub-L1 missions remain operationally constrained by the progressive degradation of active optical steering payloads and continuous mechanical disturbances.