Minimum mass solar shield for terrestrial climate control

C.R. McInnes

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

35 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The use of a large solar shield located sunward of the Sun-Earth interior Lagrange point is considered to offset increases in mean global surface temperature due to enhanced greenhouse warming. The three-body mechanics of the problem are investigated to optimize the shield location, thus minimizing the shield mass and improving on previous studies of this concept. While shield mass is minimized, the required mass is still of order 1011 kg to offset an enhancement of greenhouse warming of order 2 K. Clearly, such schemes require significant technological capabilities, although the optimization presented in this paper reduces the scale of the problem to some extent.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)307-311
Number of pages4
JournalJBIS, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society
Volume55
Issue number9-10
Publication statusPublished - 2002

Keywords

  • climate control
  • global warming
  • solar shields
  • guidance systems

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