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Solar Sail to be Launched This Year
mad_goldfish writes: "Spaceflight Now is reporting that the Russians are preparing a Solar Sail for launch sometime after September aboard a Cosmos 1 rocket. Apparently most of the components have now been tested and they are getting ready to integrate all the flight components. Just the camera, S-band radio and main computer are yet to be completed."
so can we sail from here to Cardasia using one of those Sails? I mean the Bejorins did it.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
This site is a great one for more info about solar sails. Exciting technology, I remember watching Cosmos and Segan talking about it.
You know what, I first heard of this and I thought, "Geez, America is getting behind in the Space Race", but you know what? I wish them the best of luck because ultimately the quest for Space Knowledge with benefit the whole planet.
Good Luck!
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
This is the cheapest, simplest form of probe there is. It rides a fundamental law of quantum mechanics that reflected photons transmit more force than absorbed ones. Unfortunately, it will take quite awhile to go anywhere significant.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
And before you ask: public transportation and my own two feet.
Here is the co-organisers (Planetary Society) website (deeplinked to avoid crappy flash front page). It's done in conjunction with Cosmos Studios.
There is much more in-depth information and some pictures on both of those sites.
Great news! Lets load up all the powermacs and emacs and fling them into the sun! Hopefully the mac users will follow them shortly.
There is more info on the Spacecraft here on the Planetary Society Website.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Here (from this site).
Talk about Crazy Eddie.
I don't mean to be obnoxious, but what are their goals here? I read the article and all it talked about was the mission, not about what the Russians hope to gain out of solar sail. I know in general what solar sails in general would theoretically enable, but what specifically are the Russians preparing?
My only question is whether the "kick rocket" will enter orbit with the spacecraft.
It's nice to see that they are still able to do some cool R&D type work. I wonder how much of this type of thing is funded by their new space tourism program? It sure would be interesting to see a budget breakdown on that. Perhaps that could get NASA to think about a similar program. It seems like a great way to fund space research without tax dolllars..
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
You know it's just the first step, next there'll be...
Solar Surfboards ("Dude, killer photon streams today!")..,
Solar Beach Parties ("Hey, wicked tan in only 2 seconds!")...
and of course, the ultimate insult, Solar Jet Skis (but at least you can't hear the noise from the engine).
modern choral music...
It's really interesting that they'll launch it from a submarine. I wonder if a submarine launch is in any way better than a regular one, or if they do it just because they have some spare ballistic missiles to use.
Maybe the rocket gains some starting speed from floating up to the surface before ignition, but then again this speed should be very small in comparison to the final speed of the rocket...
Anyway - the rocket's name is Volna, not Cosmos - geez, submitters, read the article!
Score:-1, Wrong
Solar Parasailing?
; - )
Don't read this!
That space someday will be that crowded. Right now it seems like everyone is content to huddle around in LEO.
September is going to rock! Solar sailing space craft AND new Dragonball Z on cartoon network. Yup, that's my life, space and cartoons...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
"aboard a Cosmos 1 rocket." No, the name of the mission and the solar sail craft itself is "Cosmos 1," not the rocket.
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
"The 88-pound spacecraft will also carry a camera that will capture pictures of the solar sails during the mission. "
Wow, talk about a lean ship....why don't they do more like this..? Send a 12" ball covered in solar panels, lil cam and lil' jet propellers to right itself when need be, and just fire that sucker out of a cannon or something into space?
Well that was a very carttonish description, but really, just like other tech. smaller may be the way to go here as well.
Interesting stuff
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Can we seperate reality from science fiction here. Using DS1 as a reference is like Dan Quayle using Candice Bergman's character "Murphy Brown" as an example against being single mother.
..because it's the only thing that really gets us capitalist pigs off of our ass and into gear.
history of space race
(well, it's not going to start another space race, but it sure would be nice if it regenerated a little interest in the general public.)
Here's an abstract from a paper that discusses colonizing Mars in some detail. Very interesting.
"The economic viability of colonizing Mars is examined. It is shown, that of all bodies in the solar system other than Earth, Mars is unique in that it has the resources required to support a population of sufficient size to create locally a new branch of human civilization. It is also shown that while Mars may lack any cash material directly exportable to Earth, Mars' orbital elements and other physical parameters gives a unique positional advantage that will allow it to act as a keystone supporting extractive activities in the asteroid belt and elsewhere in the solar system. The potential of relatively near-term types of interplanetary transportation systems is examined, and it is shown that with very modest advances on a historical scale, systems can be put in place that will allow individuals and families to emigrate to Mars at their own discretion. Their motives for doing so will parallel in many ways the historical motives for Europeans and others to come to America, including higher pay rates in a labor-short economy, escape from tradition and oppression, as well as freedom to exercise their drive to create in an untamed and undefined world. Under conditions of such large scale immigration, sale of real-estate will add a significant source of income to the planet's economy. Potential increases in real-estate values after terraforming will provide a sufficient financial incentive to do so. In analogy to frontier America, social conditions on Mars will make it a pressure cooker for invention. These inventions, licensed on Earth, will raise both Terrestrial and Martian living standards and contribute large amounts of income to support the development of the colony."
NASA has been working on an alternative to the Solar Sail. The Solar Sail has one major draw back in its design (other than being technically difficult to implement), and that is the farther out in space it goes, the less force is transmitted to it by the solar wind. (Inverse square law.) A geophysicist is currently working on the idea of using a magnetic bubble as a solar sail. The advantage of this approach is that the mag bubble grows as the solar wind decreases. This creates a force that would be relatively constant until the heliopause (the end of the solar winds effective range) is reached.
is that the russians have the cash to send this up. I haven't heard anything about them borrowing for this project, and we all know how stellar an economy they have - shit, at this rate we (us) should be able to put a 300m sail up in less than a year, especially since it looks like this would take up maybe one shuttle payload. now going off on a tangent, what happened to the russian orbiter? haven't heard about that one in years...
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
You can park a submarine at the equator, which makes it easier to launch. It doesn't require a special facility, and it gives the Russian Navy something to do.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
The magnetic bubble approach uses less mass, is possibly more energy efficient, has a more flexible design, has a much greater operating range, and offers the wonderful bonus of sheilding the craft from the solar wind. Although since it can't capture the energy from photons, only ionized particles, the motive force is fundamentally different.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Any of you astronomer types out there able to give a rough guess as to the intinsic brightness of this thing? Will it be a naked-eye object? Perhaps only at certain times of the year, when Earth crosses it's reflection path. Inquiring minds (and lazy slashdotters) want to know.
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
Other countries are ahead of us... We're doing the same things at the university level already.
the ultimate insult, Solar Jet Skis (but at least you can't hear the noise from the engine).
But that laser shinning straight up will be obnoxious.
well.... the way things are now, the biggest hardware cost for space flight is the launch vehicle. you need like 7.5 kilometers/second to get into Low Earth Orbit, this generally sets you back $5K to $10K per kg into LEO (or like a factor of 3 or 4 higher for Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit, which is used for comm sats).
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/launchers/
then you need like another 3 or 4 kilometers/second to get to the rest of the solar system (and you can do tricks like gravity assist etc once away from earth)
so the problem isnt using a chem. rocket to go to mars, jupiter, etc but hauling that rocket's fuel up into LEO...
solar sails require zero fuel. other futuristic space propulsion types all consume LOTS of power, which means bigger launch vehicle, bigger costs
SUV's support terrorism !
that's all.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars
I found Red Mars to be the best, followed by Green Mars. These two gave the best presentation of what it would be really like to colonize Mars that I've ever read. Cool books.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
right here - current conditions:
Solar Wind speed: 512.9 km/s
density:3.5 protons/cm3
plus more.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Many Many times the same thought recurs in my mind....I have been born too early....
With no chance of taking off beyond earth to the other planets and beyond in this lifetime, I feel I would have been better off born a 1000 years from now.
I can clearly see myself riding on spaceships, and going to different star systems, and different planets. In other words, the life depicted in Star Strek.
Raring to say, "Beam me down, Scotty!!".... Alas!!!!!!!
That the Russian economy is definitely on the upside. Just read a bit about their new tax laws and the results. Should be required reading for all taxpayers.
3 1- 00.shtml2 2102.html3 2102.htmlm ent/comment -mitchell032202.shtml
http://www.theglobalist.com/nor/gdiary/2000/05-
http://www.russiaeconomy.org/comments/0
http://www.heritage.org/views/2002/ed0
http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_com
For more, just hit google.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Reminds me of Deep Space 9, Season 3, Episode 22, "Explorers", which I just watched this morning. Sisko and his son pilot a reconstruction of an ancient Bajoran solar-sail spacecraft to Cardassia. They run ino some difficulties with "tachyon eddies" ripping their sails off.
Wonder if there really are some kind of particle eddies which would damage the sails?
Well, it's not so much that solar sails require zero fuel, it's just that the fuel they need isn't being provided by us.
And yes, that's a big advantage.
The big disadvantage, of course, is that solar sails are freaking slow. And freaking big. Freaking big means there's a lot more things to go wrong. Freaking slow means that you have to be able to wait a long, long time for any data from the sail. The other problem with freaking slow is that if it's too slow then it's likely to be passed in transit by some newer technology that isn't freaking slow.
Using solar sails for in-system transit would take years to go places (which may be ok for unmanned ships). Using them for interstellar voyages without some kind of powered assist (e.g. - space based microwave power station) makes it so slow that you'll either get passed or whatever agenda sent you is long gone by the time you get to your objective.
Solar sails are definitely neat, but they aren't a panacea to space travel problems.
What they might need to do is develop an 'organic' sail that grows over time, increasing the surface area to match (as closely as possible) the inverse sqare rule.
**>>BELCH
Can you tack against a solar wind? I kinda don't think that photons exhibit a gas pressure like wind (you can push a balloon around, but not inflate it with light?) that would make use of a wing surface on a sail for movment against the solar wind.
Does anyone know? Are solar sailers destined to get thrust only away from the sun?
Adam
Does anyone know whether these sails work with a bernoulli effect (like a yacht sail) or simple momentum transfer (like a parachute)?
Please forgive the oversimplification, it's done in the name of clarity.
So the next time your radar detector goes off, it might not be a cop, it could be NASA trying to communicate with a Solar Sail!
I'm a lacto-ovo-pesco-carno-vegetarian
If, for example, the US actually put money into more energy efficient transportation, like passenger rail, more people might use it. Then we would be able to better use our resources for improving our other much more wasteful forms of transportation.
For Example:
--
Federal transportation funding 1971-2001
$1,890,000,000,000 Air & highway funding
$ 30,100,000,000 National Passenger Rail funding
-Sources: New York Times, Washington Post
So here's a question for you - if a solar sail is reflective on one side, and absorptive (black) on the other, shouldn't it be possible to sail on ambient light (including starlight, slowly) alone? If I'm not mistaken that's the same principle as those little whirling light bulb toys.
Does the russian design exploit this property?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
When this thing gets up to speed.
First: Turn console switch ON... and LEAVE EVERYTHING ALONE.
Please refer to this for additional instruction.
And I can not repeat this enough: Watch out for the grid bugs!
Solar sails aren't necessarily slow. Current space probes have no onboard main engines, just attitude jets, sometimes a braking engine. They leave earth with a big push, but after that they only way they can accelerate is with gravity slingshots. And it still takes them years to get anywhere. Cassini was launched in what, 1997, and it still hasn't made it to Saturn yet.
Solar sails (and ion engines) will also get a big push off from earth, will also be able to gravity-well slingshot. And they will also be able to accelerate continuously while en-route. They will be much, much faster than the current probes.
Just so you know, some of the designs (most notably the sails) were tested by adolescent (think Freshman/Sophomore in high school) students. True story! Here is a link to the project description, though it's brief on info, and here is an mpeg of the simulations. I wouldn't be too frightened, though, since they did a generally good job.
"For success, it is essential you have Thunderball Fists." "I can have such a thing?" "That's right. Thunderball Fists."
Anyone remember the series of gradeschool books that began with Lions, Tigers, and Dinosaurs? The 6th grade book contained a story about a family leaving in a lightsail ship. Within minutes it was going too fast for even laser beam communications to keep up with it!
Wow!
If I recall correctly, it also had a story about a little Indian or Mexican boy who went in for a haircut. The barber told him to go away because he had a "greasy head". Later the barber cut his hair because he was a friend of someone. All I could think was why the hell didn't he go home and wash his greasy head. What a dope! Is the barber supposed to get all his tools greasy because the boy is a slob?
Since there is little to bump into in space (ie. friction) the probe will move faster and faster. To a point of course.
I once shot a man who posted too many, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
very very excited by this launch but I hope it works in ways I don't normally worry about launches. whats the chance that NASA would try a solar sail if the russians fail? and the russians don't strike me as being pioneers anymore. ok this is pioneering but they don't strike me as being successful pioneers of late. good luck ruskies.
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Just the camera, S-band radio and main computer are yet to be completed.
Well, atleast the wings are installed... its almost ready.
...run into any grid bugs or recognizers out there.
Geez, 100 posts and NOBODY took a stab at a comment like this?
Those who complain about affect & effect on
UW Staff Bios. Read the very last one. Robert Winglee. He has been developing M2P2, a technology similar to Solar Sails, but much easier and efficient. I don't have a link to his essay on it [pdf], but it is very lengthy, and describes all the needs of such a system.
Basically it takes gas, heats it to a very high temperature, strips away everything but the plasma, and shoots the plasma into a magnetic field which then catches the solar wind. Rather ingenious. Speed are incredible (twice current technology), and it has massive fuel economy.
I was at a speech of his, in which he explained the technology, and it's competitors in the field. Basically, a solar sail is extremely inefficient, because it has to weigh nil, be thinner than paper, and not tear easily.
"whats the chance that NASA would try a solar sail if the russians fail? " - almost certain.
... i doubt NASA will touch solar sails in a loong time. No politician wants to pay for the honor of trailing the russians.
Having good american engineering succeed where the Russians failed should be just the kind of story that NASA could use to get funding from politicians.
Now if the Russians were succesful
Of mod points that is. He even marked it OT himself. Time and points would be much better spent modding good stuff up!
First off, thanks to Gibby's Box of Trix, Alien54, europrobe, IAmSanco, DNS-and-BIND, and anyone else I may have missed for straighening out some of the posts mistakes.
Allow me to officially clarify a few things...
The solar sail vessel being launched this September is, as DNS put it, NOT a Russan project, but a privately funded project of the Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios. You can read more about the project here: http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/index2.html
Also, the Society is using a converted, submarine-launched Volna ICBM (a Russan missile) to launch the solar sail into orbit. Additionally, the solar sail is being built at the Babakin Space Center in Russia, under contract to the Planetary Society.
Finally, the sailing vessel's name is "Cosmos 1."
If you want to learn more about the project's progress, I suggest you subscribe to our SolarSail newsletter at http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/index2.html
Darrin Dennis
Web Marketing
The Planetary Society