ESTCube-LuNa: ESTCube Lunar Nanospacecraft mission video

[embed]The Electric Sail Test Cube Lunar Nanospacecraft (ESTCube-LuNa) is being designed to perform electric solar wind sail (E-sail) propulsion experiments in the Moon’s orbit, where the solar wind blows the majority of the time.

Ahoy Travellers,

We are back with a whole series of blog posts on the ESTCube-LuNa mission concept. Back in May 2023, we published our early mission design ideas, and since then, we have prepared a journal article, Slavinskis et al. 2024 “Electric Sail Test Cube — Lunar Nanospacecraft, ESTCube-LuNa: Solar-Wind Propulsion Demonstration Mission Concept”, for the Aerospace Special Issue “Advances in CubeSat Sails and Tethers”. Palos et al. 2023 published an open-access article, “Electric Sail Mission Expeditor, ESME: Software Architecture and Initial ESTCube Lunar Cubesat E-Sail Experiment Design”, in the same issue, as did Dalbins et al. 2023, with their article “Interplanetary Student Nanospacecraft: Development of the LEO Demonstrator ESTCube-2”. With the ESTCube-LuNa mission video above, we are restarting the Space Travel Blog series on the challenging and exciting new propulsion experiment.

Several aspects of the mission have been elaborated in the second half of 2023: the ESTCube-LuNa team developed an E-sail propulsion experiment for the modification of orbital altitude, which in turn can be tracked with radio frequency ranging and with optical navigation. We also developed an E-sail torque experiment for the modification of spin rate. The new mission design aspects required a system engineering update in terms of power harvesting, communications, and orientation control. The plan is to publish these topics as Space Travel Blog posts in the first half of 2024.

Today, we are excited to present the mission video at the top of this page — our vision on how ESTCube-LuNa might work, while the mission analysis team is designing new nanospacecraft systems and operations as necessitated by the E-sail experiment in the lunar orbit’s solar wind environment. We will keep you posted. Meanwhile, you can also check out the Tartu Observatory Space Tech seminar given on December 6, 2023.

[embed]

Enjoy, Andris, an E-Sailor 🫡