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NASA to Launch Solar Sail
arbitraryaardvark writes "Physorg reports that NASA will launch a solar sail around the end of July. It'll be the first of its kind; a previous attempt blew up. It's a small proof-of-concept gizmo, not a full-on spaceyacht.
Solar sails operate on photon pressure from sunlight. They are well known to science fiction readers, otherwise not so much." C-net has coverage, too.
Yeah well, Hollywood and science haven't ever mixed well, for the most part.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"Yeah well, Hollywood and {science, art, engineering, law, philosophy, history, fantasy, ...} haven't ever mixed well, for the most part."
There. Fixed it for you.
I'll give you a hint. Hollywood is like a marketing department at an engineering firm. They have learned very well that they don't need to understand the product to sell it. Package a movie with a couple of hunks and babes as well as some explosions and dramatic music, and nobody is going to care about its accuracy.
Probably interesting to watch, but something of a waste. The moon's close enough we could study an area carefully (for minerals and features and other details), then when we know it's composition well, we put a nuke up there, and we'll get much more helpful information about it, as well as be able to select the damage threshold more exactly. Less variation in the results is better, correct?
Roughly speaking, a 220lb spacecraft at a million miles an hour would be 6-1/2 kilotons, about 1/2 the energy of Hiroshima, except of course, it would distribute that energy directly into the ground, not in an air burst. It wouldn't even make the news, from an earthquake point of view, they're measured in thousands of megatons. To eyeball it, take a look at "Minor Scale", it's a little smaller, 4.8 ktons, but wikipedias got a decent picture of the detonation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Scale
My guess is the moon probably still gets impacts like this on occasion, so wasting a spacecraft might be redundant.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.