Space environmental effects on solar sails

Abstract: As the average temperature on Earth keeps rising and becoming a greater threat to life on Earth, several methods has been proposed to mitigate the effects of elevated temperatures or to lower the Earth's average temperature drastically. One suggestion is a solar sail shade that blocks a portion of the incoming sunlight. There are several difficulties to overcome for such a mission and a demonstrator has been proposed to show the feasibility of solar sail shading.This paper is a study of the space radiations interaction with solar sail membrane, in literature and with calculations of the radiation environment with the aim to investigate the feasibility of the demonstrator.The findings of this paper is that there is not enough to show that the mission will be successful, however it is feasible. The major difficulties are the temperature dependence and the still unknown reaction that thin material, the solar sail membrane, has with the space environment. The core interaction for a solar sail membrane is of an energy level range that has not been relevant in other fields, protons with energy less than 10 keV specifically, thus there is a lack of knowledge in the desired energy range.