Solar Sail News and Upcoming JPL Missions

abkaiser writes "I had the opportunity to interview a supervisor at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The JPL is putting together several missions utilizing solar sail technology. The interview and article detail where NASA and the JPL are in using solar sails for applications and research.You can read the article or skip ahead to the cool pictures of prototype and proposed solar sails. The article addresses NASA's JPL solar sail missions, but not other commercial or private projects like Cosmos 1."

Comments

I remember this idea from years ago

[Macka]

At the tender age of 12 (some 29 years ago) I submitted a drawing of a space ship powered by sails as part of a school homework assignment. I got the idea after visiting a friends house and seeing a strange ornament displayed in their window. It was a glass dome and inside were 4 paddles mounted cross wise (horizontally) on a vertical support. One side of each paddle was black and the other white (or silver, its hard to remember now). On a nice sunny day the paddles would start to spin. I was so enchanted by this I never forgot it, and dreamed about flying through space on solar sales for years after. I never guessed that one day I might actually get to see it in action.

interesting physics

[bcrowell]

One interesting thing about the physics of solar sails is that, counterintuitively, the worst possible thing to do with one is turn it perpendicular to the sun's rays. You actually get the maximum rate of transfer of kinetic energy if the sail is at 55 degrees to the rays, rather than 90 (explanation here, p. 149). There are also some pretty counterintuitive physical results about ordinary water sailing, e.g., that it's possible for some racing sailboats to complete a closed-loop course at an average speed greater than the speed of the wind!