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Solar Sail to be Launched This Year

Posted by timothy on from the not-to-the-moon-alice dept.

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."

6 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Green Team In Space by Chucow · · Score: 2, Interesting
    That's very cool, very interesting. Glad to see that at least one space program is finally getting smart, creating a way to save energy and resources in space as well as to reduce space clutter.

    My only question is whether the "kick rocket" will enter orbit with the spacecraft.

  2. Re:why? by Zathrus · · Score: 3, Interesting
    To quote the website:


    WHY: To conduct the first solar sail flight and demonstrate the technique for traveling between planets -- and someday, to the stars.

    The purpose is proof-of-concept. Which is a fairly standard thing to do. NASA has done some proof-of-concept on space tethers in the past few years, but I'm not aware of any solar sail testing (but I also don't read the various space websites religiously).

    Note that this seems like a really small sail (30m diameter) for such a heavy payload (40 kg). But it is, after all, just proof-of-concept.

    Get a sufficiently light sail with a large enough coverage area and you can get to a reasonable percentage of C in a pretty short time. It works better if you have a space-based microwave power station that you test by launching this super-light sail (this is proposed/popularized by Robert Forward in a number of different science fiction/fact books).

    The issue with any space exploration is cost. To do exploration in a reasonable amount of time (100 years) you have to go a significant percentage of C. That's a LOT of speed and costs a LOT of money. You have to bankroll the project somehow, and in this case compound interest is working against you. If you can somehow bankroll a space-based power station (and it's the most cost-effective space construction I've heard of yet, but still requires something on the order of $1 TRILLION to build initially), then the cost of a super-light probe is pretty minor. Especially since you can start recouping costs immediately.
  3. The Economic Viability of Mars Colonization by bihoy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."

  4. Check Space Weather when sailing by ch-chuck · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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); }
  5. Just like the ancient Bajorans by Wise+Dragon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  6. How does this work? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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