Jun'ichiro Kawaguchi

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully achieved the world's first solar power sail technology by IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun) mission in 2010. It demonstrated a photon propulsion and thin film solar power generation during its interplanetary cruise. The 200m2-span sail was deployed and kept extended by centrifugal force of the spacecraft rotation. IKAROS also succeeded in accelerating and controlling the orbit by actively exploiting solar radiation pressure, and thus became the world's first actual solar sailer flying an interplanetary voyage. This paper presents the design of IKAROS solar sail system, operation results and introduces a perspective of this new technology to apply to the next generation mission toward Jupiter and Trojan asteroids.

General description, communication subsystem configuration and rescue operation after communication link down about the Asteroid Explorer "Hayabusa" which was launched on May of 2003, arrived at Asteroid "Itokawa" on September of 2005 and finally returned to the earth on June of 2010, are described.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) makes the world's first solar power sail craft IKAROS demonstration of photon propulsion and thin film solar power generation during its interplanetary cruise. The spacecraft deploys and spans a membrane of 20 meters in diameter using the spin centrifugal force. It also deploys thin film solar cells on the membrane, in order to evaluate its thermal control property and anti-radiation performance in the real operational field. The spacecraft weighs approximately 310kg, launched together with the agency's Venus Climate Orbiter, AKATSUKI on May 21, 2010. This paper presents the summary of development and operation of IKAROS.

The asteroid explorer Hayabusa, which is the spacecraft for asteroid sample return mission of Japan, came back to the Earth on June 13, 2010, seven year after the launch. It is the first spacecraft in the world that went to a solar system body farther than the moon, touched down on its surface, took off, and came back to the earth. Hayabusa has many new challenges; some of them were successful but others were unsuccessful. As the results, Hayabusa revealed the strange nature of a small near earth asteroid, Itokawa. In this paper, we describe the whole mission of Hayabusa.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will make the solar power sail craft demonstrate for both its photon propulsion and thin film solar power generation during its interplanetary cruise. The spacecraft deploys and spans its membrane taking the advantage of the spin centrifugal force. The deployment system of large membrane was developed. The overall deployment experiment of solar power sail using a balloon was planned. However the balloon was not launched due to the bad weather. In this paper, the contents and significance of the experiment are reported.

In this article, preliminary feasibility assessment of aeroassist systems for JAXA's future Mars Exploration has been conducted. The aerobraking technology is found to bring about an increase in the payload ratio by considerable reduction of the propellant mass required for orbital descent after propulsive orbital insertion. The aerocapture technology, if accuracy in both the interplanetary orbit determination and guidance is improved, is shown to achieve a remarkable increase of the payload mass using the state-of-the-art technologies. Discussions are made on the guided entry systems which are expected to realize better landing mark precision than obtained by the ballistic flight.

As many varieties of microsatellite missions have been purposed, microsatellite's performances are becoming higher level. It is important to develop higher level 3-axis attitude control mechanics. We purpose an innovative 3-axis attitude control for microsatellite by using Reflectivity Control Device, RCD which is capable of changing its reflectance by imposed voltage. This paper shows one example of 3-axis attitude control using RCD, and advantages of this method by being compared to non RCD methods which used only reaction wheel.

(in Japanese)

(in Japanese)

(in Japanese)