Slashdot Mirror
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."
This site is a great one for more info about solar sails. Exciting technology, I remember watching Cosmos and Segan talking about it.
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.
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"
Basically, what they're hoping to get out of it is space travel on the cheap. If you want to send a probe to the outer parts of the solar system, you can't carry enough fuel to constantly thrust. So you have to slingshot around other planets eking out a small supply of fuel for correctional purposes.
Ion drive, as in Deep Space 1, is a way to lower the amount of fuel needed. This gives a very low level of thrust, but at a constant rate, so cumulative acceleration allows you to reach high speeds. This still needs some fuel, but less fuel than chemical rockets.
A solar sail also gives low thrust which slowly builds acceleration over a period of time. And you don't need any fuel at all! So if you wanted to reach the outer solar system using a solar sail powered probe, then you wouldn't need lots of chemical rocket fuel, or ion drive propellant (Xenon was used by DS1, if I remember correctly) to get you there. You'd perhaps need a small amount for course correction, but your main source of thrust would be the sun.
Less fuel = less weight = cheaper launches.
This is just a prototype. If it works, it could lead to bigger and better solar sails which would make for cheaper spaceprobes to explore the outer reaches of the solar system.
Hmmm. Sounds like this could be another Russian first in space to me...
"Information wants to be paid"
Well, it's not so much "them." The Plenetary Society is the driving force behind the project, and they're a U.S.-based non-profit. The cool thing about this project is that it's non-governmental. The Russians are launching it bacuase they're the ones with the cheap launch vehicles.
"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.
DS1 is the name of the ion-drive probe that was launched in 1999 (I think). It's real and is now the fastest moving man-made object in space.
It's only science fiction to you due to ignorance.
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.
Unfortunately, it will take quite awhile to go anywhere significant.
Actually these will travel many times faster that current probes.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
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 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
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.
I wonder how they slow down
Either they don't, which means you do fly-bys of everything, or they slow down the same way they speed up. By using the solar wind.
I won't even begin to say I understand all the physics involved here, but apparantly you can essentially tack against the solar wind by using concentric circles and reflecting light from one circle to the other, thus giving the sail facing away from the star (or other power source) the "push".
Like I said, I don't really understand the physics.
It's discussed in Robert Forward's Indistinguisable from Magic science fact/fiction novel (discusses futuristic science from a factual standpoint, then has a related SF story after each chapter).
I suspect some sites on solar sails online would have info too.
Sigh...the spacecraft is NOT repeat NOT Russian. It is a creation of the Planetary Society, a non-profit NGO founded by Carl Sagan. The Russians are merely providing an inexpensive launch vehicle, no more.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!