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from the making-light-work-of-space-travel dept.
Centauri Dreams has a piece on the History and Future of Solar Sails. Particularly interesting is the mention of Lightsail, The Planetary Society's CubeSat-based light sails.
CubeSats are tiny, low-cost satellites that have opened up new avenues of space research for universities and small organizations.
In order for CubeSat applications to reach the next level, the miniature satellites need a reliable form of propulsion for orbital maneuvers and trips beyond our planet. This is where solar sailing—transferring the momentum of photons to a large reflective sail—comes in.
There's a mission trailer video available, and from Centauri Dreams:
We’re looking at April of next year for the first LightSail launch, which could well herald the era of small CubeSat missions driven by sail propulsion to Mars and other planets.
This piece was inspired by the recent 100 Year Starship symposium presentation by Les Johnson, Senior Technical Assistant for the Advanced Concepts Office (and former Manager of Interstellar Propulsion Technology Research) at the NASA.
Les has written a number of papers on Solar Sails, and there's a recent talk on Light Sails at 1h19m in a (ridiculously long) video of the 2013 Icarus Interstellar Congress.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Saturday September 27 2014, @11:50PM
How is this NOT from the "our-chief-engineer-is-trying-to-deploy-a-makeshift-solar-sail" dept?