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Japan To Launch Solar Sail Spacecraft "Ikaros"
separsons writes "On May 18th, Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will launch Ikaros, a fuel-free spacecraft that relies completely on solar power. The spacecraft's 46-foot-wide sails are thinner than a human hair and lined with thin-film solar panels. After a rocket brings the craft to space, mission controllers on the ground will steer Ikaros by adjusting the sails' angles, ensuring optimal radiation is hitting the solar cells. If the mission proves successful, the $16M spacecraft will be the first solar sail-powered craft to enter deep space."
Well yeah, but you could make it 100x thicker and all that debris whizzing around would still poke holes in it. This way, it's light enough to be a.) cheap to launch and b.) actually efficient enough at harnessing the solar "wind" to move its mass.
No, I suspect that's an expectation, but if the materials are built right it'll have some rip-stop capability so it'll just make a hole. That will affect the solar sail, but not significantly until you get a lot of them.
The alternative is to make something that is heavier and less effective, which will still get punctured if a bit of debris goes through it.
After all, things in space are usually not moving very slowly in relation to each other, so anything that touches it is likely to go right through anyway, regardless of the material. I suppose with something like this, the less resistance the material puts up the less its course is going to be screwed up by a space rock.
It's also relatively unlikely (though certainly not impossible) for them to have a strike in the first place. Look at how cluttered Low Earth Orbit is with Mankind's crap, and how many active satellites have ever been knocked out of commission by our own cesspool of concentrated garbage in LEO? Two that I recall, and they hit each other. I know there have been occasional stories about impacts, but they aren't terribly common, and the chances of them dwindle off rapidly past LEO and Mankind's junkyard.
Plus, $16 million?!? for a deep space probe that requires no fuel? That's chicken feed in terms of space travel. The Japanese could probably mass-produce them for $12 million a pop or less given economies of scale, send 10 of them out in different directions, lose 8 of them to debris strikes and whatever, and STILL get better science longer than pretty much anything short of nuclear we could send up today.
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Possible outcomes:
1) try > succeed > learn
2) try > fail > learn
Given the amazing low price tag for the mission, both are good outcomes.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!