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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."
It's always seemed like a bad idea to name anything after a figure whose claim to fame was that he ignored warnings against exceeding the tolerances of his vehicle, causing it to break up and kill him.
The spacecraft's 46-foot-wide sails are thinner than a human hair and lined with thin-film solar panels.
Won't that easily break if something even touches it? (lots of space rock going a few km/s out there, or am i totally off?)
the bjorans did this centuries ago :)
repeat
-.no
Very cool project, I can't wait to see this baby in action!
That said, someone already mentioned the project vehicle name, but we all know it should have been Odin: Photon Sailer Starlight.
I suddenly feel very nerdy, much more so than normal.
crazy dynamite monkey
I think it is mistaken on some of the details. A solar sail works by being pushed by photons, just as a regular sail works by being pushed by the wind. A solar panel collects light and turns it into electricity. And solar panels are much thicker than a human hair. I don't doubt that it does have some solar panels but doubt it is as much as the article seems to imply since the panels are still much weightier than a solar sail needs to be.
In the case it or one of its successors are launched to another solar system, i suggest that it carry scaled down versions of the ninja turtles, so if some come back to this mote in god's eye will never figure how we really are.
Anyone know where it's going? "Deep space" isn't much of an answer, as it includes everywhere that isn't Earth. Does it have a destination besides "away"? The article does not say...
As far as I can tell, it's an experiment to test the propulsion system with no other purpose. Here's a slightly better article about it.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Climate Change, Wars, Plaques, vanishing bees and the possibility that George Lucas might make another movie? All of these are signs that the 4 Horseman are saddling up and getting ready for a ride.
So "away" is good enough for me.
Hopefully to a planet that was not colonized by the Golgafrincham B Ark.
http://visualizecommonsense.com/
A solar panel collects light and turns it into electricity. And solar panels are much thicker than a human hair.
A solar panel is anything flat and, in this context, photovoltaic. The part of a typical solar panel where the magic happens is much thinner than a human hair; it's the junction between two materials. The rest of it is just there to protect that part (and to enable its production during manufacturing, of course.) But since thin-film solar panels have been around for more than a little while, you have no excuse for not knowing about them and yet simultaneously "contributing" to this discussion. Thin-film panels are now cost-competitive with crystalline panels and are expected to eventually be much less expensive due to their reduced energy cost of manufacture. This also reduces the time to energy payback, which was around seven years with crystalline panels in the 1970s. (I have GOT to find my source on that again, must be in some old homedir someplace...) And in space, nothing non-structural has to hold up its own weight or survive winds (aside from the solar wind) so it can be as thin as will provide sufficient tensile strength. Like, say, a sheet of plastic.
A solar sail converts photon impact to momentum. Anything photons are absorbed or reflected by is a solar sail. A solar panel converts a portion of photon impact to electricity, trading photon velocity for electron velocity. These are not incompatible goals. As far as I understand, a reflective solar sail actually imparts more velocity than an absorptive one, but both work.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...is so infested with bad JS I can't view the actual text in FF. Anyone have a working link?
This reminds me of the novel "A Mote in Gods Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Who knows, maybe one day we'll be that "mote". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye
It's in TFA. A strip on the cell is covered by cells, it is not indicated how wide it is, but it's probably pretty narrow. The sail is 7.5 micrometers thick, the cells are 25 micrometers thick. I don't know how heavy is the craft, the sail area is a bit less than 200 square meters (200 square meters minus the hole behind the main body).
They have a flashlight mounted under the solar sail to provide the becessary light when they get too far from the sun. That's why they need the solar panels, to provide power to the flashlight when it's too dark for the sail to work otherwise, which also powers the solar cells.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
With a name like "Ikaros", it's obviously going to have a parabolic flight path.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I would like to see the verification on all of these statistics from another source. I am hesitant to believe this because it costs about $450 MILLION just to launch a space shuttle once. If the article has more basis than mere rumor, this price tag cannot possibly include deployment. Maybe it's $16M on materials alone? Maybe salaries alone? Consider also that they plan on spending around $2B over the course of ten years, which is just $.3B more than the pricetag on a single Space Shuttle. I will be surprised if this actually comes to pass.
Then again, they ARE Japanese. They probably already have a nanobot-built space elevator on top of the Tokyo Arcology.
Ever see "Star Trek: The Movie"?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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!
Now all we have to do is find a tachyon eddy and we could be on Cardasia in no time.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I assume you mean "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", unless you meant the 2009 movie which I have seen called "Star Trek: The Movie" a few times... but that would appear to be off topic?
You would be right if they were aiming for the name in english. Íkaros is his name in latin.
At least its easier to write than greek: , which Slashdot can't even parse...
You're joking, but there were some serious design proposals from the '70s and earlier to use a large laser on Earth (or, ideally, near Earth) to power a spacecraft. With a large solar panel in orbit around a star driving a laser, a craft with a solar sail could continue to accelerate deep into interstellar space. The acceleration would be small, but a fraction of a g adds up when it's constant over a period of years.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I haven't really payed much attention to Japan's space program in the past...heck I didn't really know they had a space program. But they recently landed a probe on an asteroid, and returned it to earth with asteroid rocks. When I read that it was like, "Oh. Japan has a space program, and they actually did something scientifically interesting". It seems like space programs are all about bitching about government funding and endlessly redesigning ancient rocket designs and speculating about manned missions to other planets, and meanwhile Japan went to an asteroid and brought back rocks. So when they say they are going to make this solar sail thing, I believe that they are going to make this solar sail thing.
Uhhhh, not much? If the craft fails then they are only out a few million, same thing that happens when any other spacecraft fails (except they are usually far more expensive).
Generally we try to reserve the "What could possibly go wrong" meme for things that reek of a bad idea, like making walking titanium skeletal robots, giving them machine-guns and Austrian accents, then turning over control of them to google. Space sails are a pretty simple and much discussed idea, and lack any particularly bad failure modes.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
As the term "deep" harbors pornographic connotations, I'd wager it's heading toward Uranus.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
As in, "Those things that, every time you see one, it always seems to be falling out of the sky in a screaming ball of flame before smashing into the ground".
Eric Baird
Well , they will certainly melt if they get too close to the sun , that's for sure.
Slipping shoelaces ?
This is a bit offtopic but it's becoming more prevalent and frustrating on slashdot. Is there a chance we could stop posting so many Inhabitat stories to slashdot? More often than not they aren't even stories so much as single paragraph posts that say, "Look at this really cool technology! Isn't it cool and, more importantly green?" They never even bother to go into a decent amount of technical detail about the really cool technology. Hell, in this case, the wikipedia article has more relevant technical details than the Inhabitat article. It's not like we put a post to slashdot every time a new wikipedia article on technology opens up. For that matter, if we are just posting links to websites about really cool technology, we could easily go digging through websites that are dedicated to the particular technology to get the really juicy bits of interest. For instance, when talking about Ikaros, why don't we try looking it up on one of the dozens of websites dedicated to cataloging spacecraft? Well that's not news is it? That's just cataloging interesting technology which, as far as I can tell, is all Inhabitat does.
I guess what I am getting at is that just because Inhabitat stumbled upon something cool they didn't know existed, it doesn't mean there is any news regarding that particular item. Now, if Ikaros launched recently, or if it's mission was underway, or if it was experiencing some technical difficulties, that would be something. The fact that the mission exists in the first place is neither a recent development nor particularly newsworthy. It seems like the firehose is getting clogged with Inhabitat submissions and frankly its starting to seem like slashvertising for the blog.
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"Maybe in order to understand Mankind, we have to look at the word
itself: "Mankind". Basically, it's made up of two separate words -
"mank" and "ind". What do these words mean ? It's a mystery, and that's
why so is mankind."
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I wonder how much speed it picks up after a few months/years? I think I remember reading that these things go quite fast eventually, due to the perpetual acceleration. Speaking of which, is there any way to slow it down?
I'm surprised that there hasn't been a single EVE reference to this project yet.
Soon as I saw this project, I thought, "It's like they're developing a Minmatar frigate of some sort!"
With that in mind, I genuinely hope that this project exceeds expectations, and that we may see more projects like this in our near future. Good luck and best wishes.
One of these days, I am going to flip out. When I flip out, I'll be back in five minutes.
That's an excellent attitude and it (unsurprisingly) mirrors my own thoughts on Japan's space program. They're doing *cool stuff* that can spark the imagination. And they're doing it for amazingly reasonable sums of money.
The point was that Bajorans have made it to Cardassia long before either species had developed warp technology.
Kinda like as if Ikaros would suddenly made it to Alpha Centauri in a matter of minutes. And found Na'vi there.
Whether Bajorans used chemical rockets, space elevators or giant catapults to get their solar-sail ships to space in the first place is rather irrelevant compared to that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You know space isn't completely empty. There are particles floating around there. How is a solar sail thinner than a human hair going to hold up to being bombarded with small particles, especially if they fly it at any decent velocity?
Daedalus flew too close to the sun, melted his wings, and died.
His father, Icarus, the creator of the wings, then landed and never flew again in mourning over his son, who's death Icarus was in part responsible for.
Mythology fail! Icarus flew too high and fell.
Actually, "Icarus" (or rather "ICARVS") is the Latin form of his name, see e.g. Ovid's Metamorphoses . "Ikaros" is a direct transliteration of the original Greek form.
-1 Exactly Backwards.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=daedalus+and+icarus/
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
The xkcd blog had an entry about this a while back. it showed that in combination with a large mirror to reflect the beam several times, you get several orders of magnitude in efficiency improvement.
Not a typewriter
Both work, but they have different operating characteristics. An absorptive solar sail can only impart velocity directly away from the sun. A reflective solar sail can impart momentum at an angle, because the angle at which the photon leaves the sail also imparts momentum.
Unfortunately, both kinds are affected by the solar wind (which is usually approx. directly away from the sun, but can vary wildly when it's distorted by magnetic fields. And which can't be tacked against, unless you charge your sails sufficiently with a charge opposite to that of the incoming wind...and maybe not then. (Even if this would work, it's impractical.)
So solar sailing can be expected to be tricky, and difficult to develop. Highly worth it, though, for slow freight. (Which means automating it enough [and hardening it enough] that it doesn't need to carry a life support system, and doesn't depend on remote controllers when the solar wind and magnetic fields are kicking up a storm.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's because their purpose is space exploration, rather than the dispensing of pork to key Congressional districts like NASA.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Name FAIL
Well...
If they're large enough you could use them to burn down cities and wipe out food supplies, but I guess we already have pretty effective ways of doing that.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Calling it the Ikaros is sort of like calling a new ship you build "The Titanic". It doesn't do a lot to inspire confidence.
Here's to hoping to works for them though, it's definitely ambitious and way cool.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
spacecraft will be the first solar sail-powered craft to enter deep space
Depends on your definition of "deep space". I understood that to mean outside the solar system. A quick googling shows two definitions: 1. interstellar 2. interplanetary and beyond. So definitely not clear. In any case, it's somewhat moot since there's never been any solar sail-powered craft, ever, that succeeded in deploying its sail. Even in Earth orbit.
Really... I hope it works out well.
Unfortunately, both kinds are affected by the solar wind (which is usually approx. directly away from the sun, but can vary wildly when it's distorted by magnetic fields. And which can't be tacked against, unless you charge your sails sufficiently with a charge opposite to that of the incoming wind...and maybe not then. (Even if this would work, it's impractical.)
Nonsense! Simply build a keel of conductive material on the spacecraft that will give the ship a preferred direction of motion through the Luminiferous Aether and you can tack 'upwind' as easily as you tack up a river!
The enemies of Democracy are
As far as I can tell, it's an experiment to test the propulsion system with no other purpose. Here's a slightly better article about it.
Then what a waste. Seriously.
One thing I admire about NASA is its ability to pull in secondary and tertiary missions. If you're just going to send it flying, at least put on a simple camera and send it somewhere useful. Fly by the outer planets, or visit the asteroid belt, or try for a comet or KBO. Surely there's at least one object in the solar system within range for simple observations.
Was that before or after Laius killed Oedipus and married Jocasta?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Simply build a keel of conductive material on the spacecraft that will give the ship a preferred direction of motion through the Luminiferous Aether and you can tack 'upwind' as easily as you tack up a river!
Generally speaking, having a surface charge on your spacecraft is dangerous. It tends to induce errors in the internal electronics and it can also enact a magnetic moment on the spacecraft itself. Of course, if the surface charge can be modeled in advance then such effects can be accounted for, but that adds a whole new layer of complexity to the design.
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While your discussion of thin film solar cells is true, most solar cells deployed in spacecraft are covered in doped cover glass to help protect the solar cell and extend its life (constant bombarding from various wavelengths that the cell is not manufactured to absorb decreases lifetime). That said, while thin film solar cells do exist and can be used, they will have a significantly reduced lifespan when compared to glass covered hard cells. I am sure the designers of this mission accounted for this reduced lifespan, but it should be noted that using thin film flexible cells, as opposed to glass covered cells involves a trade-off. Also, thin film cells have slightly different thermal problems that need to be dealt with. Whereas rigid cells usually have a heat rejection path designed into them, thin film cells may not. Although, this can easily be accounted for by painting the 'back' side of the solar cell the right color and using the whole damn thing as a radiator.
... for a general discussion of conventional solar cell architecture for space applications.
And just to discourage any [citation needed] stuff, please seeThe Fundamentals of Space Systems - Vincent L. Pisacane, Chapter 6: Space Power Systems. Section 6.5: Solar Cell Arrays, Subsection 6.5.1 Array Construction.
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You know I never actually read the XKCD blog but damn, that was an interesting theory. The final death ray design phase reminds me, starkly, of Nikola Tesla....
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If you're just going to send it flying, at least put on a simple camera and send it somewhere useful. Fly by the outer planets, or visit the asteroid belt, or try for a comet or KBO. Surely there's at least one object in the solar system within range for simple observations.
Yeah, I know what you mean, but where is the power to run the experiment going to come from? They didn't include an RTG on the spacecraft and a few square feet of solar panels is aren't going to provide enough power for long. All the articles I can find are short on detail but it appears as if the thing is no more than the minimum amount of hardware necessary to run a test of the solar sail. Even its launch was piggybacked with another spacecraft.
This ain't rocket surgery.
But they recently landed a probe on an asteroid, and returned it to earth with asteroid rocks
Well, not exactly. They sent a spacecraft to an asteroid to hover above the asteroid, shoot a pellet at it, scoop up some debris, and come back. Instead, part of the system failed. The spacecraft landed to preserve its health while possible fixes were discussed. The landing caused the pellet shooting system to fail so no asteroid debris was collected for sure. The Japanese decided there was still some chance that something, somehow, ended up in the collection bin. They uploaded some patches to the spacecraft. The spacecraft started its journey home when more propulsion systems failed. The Japanese hacked components from three different thrusters (of four) to get one bastardized thruster working. And now it is about two months from touching down if it manages to perform all of its appropriate maneuvers with its single, bastardized thruster.
Now, that's not to trivialize the Hayabusa mission. Frankly I think it is one of the coolest space missions flying right now and I am hoping it does, indeed, have asteroid material within it. However, saying it has asteroid rocks on board is simply not true.
Also, yes, JAXA is kicking ass and taking names. It is amazing what a country of intelligent humans can do when you forbid them from developing weapons for half of a century. See also, the Japanese robotics industry. That said, JAXA is making a big push to have a presence in space right now because they see Space as one developing industry that will take off in the next few decades (as do many others). They also see robotics to be in this position hence their great achievements in that field. So, in conclusion, Japan is rocking hard in tech development because they are trying to ride the next PC wave if you will. Any entrepreneurs and investors in any other country would do well to take notes on this trend.
That said, they aren't the only ones doing really cool science right now. NASA also has solar sail and ion thruster proof of concept missions on the table (in fact, some of them use satellite buses that are only 10 cm x 10 cm x 30 cm), NASA is still developing the MSL, the Indians have a very successful lunar orbiter that detected water in lunar regolith, Armadillo Aerospace is still pioneering ahead with its work on hovering rockets for lunar landings, and the Chinese are starting to mature their launch capabilities giving them a significant presence orbit. In other words, it's not just Japan that's exciting, its everyone. But yes, I do agree that JAXA is kicking ass lately.
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You know, I'm thinking there just might be an additional problem or two with my "space keel" idea. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm sure there's plenty of pork. But this being Japan, it's raw and wrapped in seaweed with vinegar rice.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
[points] -> That way.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Possibly. =P
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