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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.
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"
Talk about Crazy Eddie.
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...
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.
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"
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.
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); }
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?
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!