Packaging and Manufacturing Processes to Enable Production of Very Large Solar Sails for Next Generation Missions

The experience of building the NEA Scout solar Sail resulted in the realization that new manufacturing technology would be required to build solar sails significantly larger than NEA Scout. During Phase I, NeXolve successfully developed and demonstrated fab and fold processes and scalable-modular pathfinder mechanisms that can be fully developed to support fabrication and packaging of larger solar sails, drag sails, power sails, or other deployable thin film structures. To meet the technical objective of developing scalable processes and mechanisms, NeXolve intentionally limited the fabrication footprint and made it smaller than the deployed sail footprint.The processes and mechanisms were developed and verified through fabrication, packaging and deployment testing of a sub-scale pathfinder solar sail. NeXolve conducted extensive design trade studies for the ldquo;four-quadrantrdquo; sail architecture while collaborating with NASA and industry partners to define and assess proposed and planned large NASA Solar Sail missions that will be enabled by the new manufacturing technology.nbsp;