On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 10:21:31PM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Wed, 13 Dec 2017, Norman Yarvin wrote:
Looking at the photo, each of the four sails seems to be anchored at
three points: the satellite, plus the other two corners, each of which
has a rod going out to it. I'm guessing the rods are made of
something quite flexible, are stored coiled up, and that all that has
to be done to deploy each sail is to release the rods' ends and let
them pull the sail out and unfold it. (The coiled rods would be
mounted on a bearing for this.)
Bonin et al, "The CanX-7 Drag Sail Demonstration Mission", SSC13-XI-9, in
the 2013 Smallsats conference, should be findable online and has quite a
bit of detail on the design of the dragsails (and other bits of CanX-7).
